Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel for National Press Photographers Association (NPPA), wrote an open letter to Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri telling him to stop using a photograph on tee shirts and other campaign merchandise. You know the photo. The one of Hawley raising a fist of solidarity to a mob of knuckle-dragging seditionists shortly before many of them stormed the ...
In late December, New York Governor Kathy Hochul vetoed the state’s library ebook bill, acknowledging that the law would be preempted by the Copyright Act. In mid-February, a district court in the State of Maryland, responding to a lawsuit filed by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), ordered a preliminary injunction suspending that state’s ebook law, also on preemption grounds. ...
Not that I have any delusions about the reach of this blog, but for what it’s worth, here’s a pro-tip for celebrities everywhere about sharing photographs of yourselves on social media: if you don’t own the rights in the image, don’t post it. This keeps happening. A celebrity posts an image of himself, the photographer who owns the rights in ...
Neil Young pulls his music from Spotify to protest the content on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills, and Nash follow suit. It’s a big story for a week, and some noise about “cancel culture” and Rogan himself lingers, but we’ve mostly moved on. Meanwhile, the economic model for music streaming is still broken. Songwriters make pennies ...
Naturally, I join the outrage directed at any school board that would presume to ban a book—let alone because they don’t want students to confront the traumas of history—but I am almost as offended by the self-proclaimed defenders of culture in the anti-copyright crowd. How dare the McMinn County Board of Education ban Maus? But at the same time, how ...
