Copyright
GOOD PORTENTS FOR GOOGLE LIBRARY?
We were waiting and watching for what promised to be a landmark fair use decision from Judge Denny Chin in the Google Library litigation when the case was stayed while its certification as a class action was appealed. In the meantime, a companion case before Judge Harold Baer, The Authors Guild v. Hathitrust, involving a consortium of universities…
Read MoreBOOK REPORT: "THE KNOCKOFF ECONOMY"
The over-arching economic problem that dogs all of American patent and copyright law is one of demarcation—when is the marginal utility of an incentive provided to one innovator “to promote progress in science and the useful arts” outweighed by the burden it places on the creativity and economic freedom of everyone else and is therefore counterproductive? In The…
Read MoreCOOKIES & MILF
Vermont’s finest ice cream purveyors, Ben & Jerry, scored a quick, preliminary legal victory this past week against porn producer Caballero Video. A few excerpts from the Temporary Restraining Order issued by the U.S. District Court in Manhattan will convey the flavor of the dispute: Defendants are hereby restrained from using the designations BEN & CHERRY’S,…
Read MoreO MARILYN, MY MARILYN
” Imagine for a moment that you earned a nickel every time that Marilyn Monroe’s “name, likeness, or persona” was exploited for commercial purposes. Now imagine it was hundreds or thousands of dollars every time. The California Legislature tried very hard to gift wrap that bonanza for the beneficiaries of Monroe’s estate, primarily her acting coach Lee Strasberg’s…
Read MorePAUL RYAN'S TWISTED SISTER
At a campaign rally in Pennsylvania yesterday, Representative Paul Ryan used Twisted Sister’s 1984 anthem “We’re Not Gonna Take It” as his walk-on (or perhaps walk-off) music. For those who don’t know or remember it, the song is a timeless expression of core Republican values (e.g., “your life is trite and jaded/boring and confiscated/if that’s…
Read More'TIS A GLORIOUS THING, TO BE A PIRATE KING
A provocatively titled op-ed recently published by the New York Times, “Internet Pirates Will Always Win,” urges content providers to give up the legal fight against online copyright infringement as an exercise in futility, as new technologies make illegal downloading and streaming ever “harder to trace and to stop.” The piece has prompted predictable responses from representatives…
Read MoreWITH AMICI LIKE THIS, WHO NEEDS HOSTIS?
Could a university chemistry department routinely scan copyrighted scientific journals in their entirety to create an electronic, searchable database that puts their contents at the fingertips of professors and students, so they could use the data compiled by others in perfectly appropriate ways in their own scholarship? I think the answer is clearly “no.” As a result, most…
Read MoreTALK RADIO
I had the great pleasure of being interviewed last night by Milt Rosenberg, WGN-Chicago, about my book, Unfair to Genius. The audio file, in which we talk radio, music, and copyright law, is here.
Read MoreCOURT: THE PITCH IS THE THING
In a ruling that may make it even harder to get face time with TV and movie studio executives to pitch an idea (“it’s like Sunrise at Campobello meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer“), the Second Circuit has ruled that claims for theft of idea arising out of such encounters are not pre-empted by the Copyright…
Read MoreGOOGLE LIBRARY PROJECT CASE NOW A REAL LAWSUIT
It has been seven years since The Authors Guild and some of its individual members first filed suit against Google, charging that its Library Project—to the extent it posted “snippets” of works still in copyright—constituted a massive copyright infringement. Initially, Google welcomed the class action as a vehicle for negotiating a global settlement of such claims that would have,…
Read More