In order for copyright law to work for all the Whos in Whoville—the small and the tall—legal reasoning must apply equally whether the plaintiffs are major enterprises or kitchen-table start-ups. While it is understandably common in the court of public opinion to favor smaller defendants being sued by larger copyright owners, the fact is that when an error of law disfavors a ...
When Black Panther opened last month and proceeded to set records at the box office, it just so happened to be 200 years, almost to the day, after Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Tuckahoe, Maryland. The significance of this particular symmetry might be observed through any number of lenses, including those distorted by presentist emotions, which tend to ...
An important and instructive decision was handed down this week by New York District Court in the KinderGuides case. KinderGuides is a series of children’s books that include adaptations of classic works with some commentary about the authors and the stories. Publisher Moppet Books has released illustrated, young-reader versions of works from the public domain like The Odyssey and Jane ...
Photo by author. This week the Supreme Court declined to consider the Authors Guild v Google case, which lets stand the Second Circuit Court ruling that Google’s use of scanned published works for its search tool Google Books constitutes a fair use. Various pundits and advocates have hailed this as a victory for the fair use principle. In fact, I ...
In Part I of this essay, I responded to a post written by Parker Higgins for Techdirt, criticizing him for trying to pack a big, unexamined conclusion into a small article. Asserting, as Techdirtians are want to do, that copyright is the omnipresent saboteur in our otherwise grand, digital machine, Higgins blames copyright’s complexity and length of terms for causing ...
