Though most people can be forgiven for missing it, two Supreme Court Decisions and a District Court granting a motion for summary judgment made a fair bit of copyright news this week. In a pair of unanimous decisions the Supreme Court settled two statutory disputes relevant to a rightsholders’ ability to enforce his copyrights. And pursuant to findings at the ...
I was reading an editorial the other day written by Stephen Witt for NPR shortly after the passing of John Parry Barlow in 2018; and it occurred to me that internet activists seem to fit one of two profiles—Mourners and Evangelicals. And both are full of shit. Witt does an excellent job summarizing the early barefoot wanderings of the college-dropout, ...
If the Supreme Court agrees to hear Allen v. Cooper, copyright owners and constitutional scholars will both be watching closely. The practical matter for copyright owners is whether a U.S. State, or agents of a State, may freely use copyrighted works without permission and remain immune from claims for infringement. As of now, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals contends ...
In 2015, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) introduced a bill that would make it a federal crime to engage in what is generically called “revenge porn.” I say generically because “revenge” alludes to a specific motive, usually that of a disgruntled ex-boyfriend who decides to get back at a former girlfriend by distributing intimate or sexually explicit images of her online. ...
In a recent post on Techdirt, Mike Masnick calls columnist Nicholas Kristof a hypocrite based on a narrative Masnick just plain made up. On December 12, Kristof published a brief column in The New York Times with a picture of a 12-year-old girl who is starving to death as a victim of the US-backed, Saudi-Arabian war in Yemen. The girl ...
