When it was announced last week that a jury awarded the major record labels a one billion-dollar-damage award in its copyright infringement case against COX Communications, certain anti-copyright voices were predictably shrill in their astonishment at such a stratospheric number. Specifically, the plaintiffs represented by the RIAA were awarded $99,830.29 per infringement of just over 10,000 songs, which is actually less ...
In response to a recent social media dustup, Mike Masnick writes on Techdirt, “…we’ve got quite a story today about how copyright is a total mess and not really fit for the way the internet works today.” To his credit, Masnick does a solid job describing both the circumstances and the legal mechanisms relevant to a conflict that arose when ...
Now that the holiday shopping season is officially underway, it seems like a good time to talk about counterfeit products; and it may surprise some readers to know that consumers have almost no meaningful protection against the tens of thousands of counterfeiters operating online. At best, a counterfeit product will merely be disappointing; at worst, it will set the house ...
On Saturday, Digital Music News reported that BMG Rights Management has reached a “substantial” settlement agreement with Cox Communications, thus ending a four-year legal battle that was teed up for a retrial in district court before the end of this month. In December of 2105, a jury awarded $25 million plus $8 million in fees to BMG, finding Cox guilty ...
Attorney and journalist Charles J. Glasser published an editorial in The Daily Caller titled: Mind Manipulation? No, Censorship By Copyright is The REAL Threat to Elections. The irony of that misleading headline, which does not truly reflect the substance of Glasser’s article, is that it reinforces a general bias about copyright (i.e. that it is censorship) for the simple reason ...
