Last Monday, the world’s largest distributor of audiobooks, Audible, had intended to launch a new service called Caption, a feature that uses voice-to-text transcription technology to display the text of an audiobook on a user’s screen in synch with the narration. In late August, seven major publishers* filed suit against Audible, alleging that the unlicensed Caption feature amounts to copyright infringement ...
As with so many copyright questions, the answer is “it depends.” I stumbled into a discussion on Twitter last week that included some fairly cynical reactions to an artist named Chris Williams, who filed a copyright infringement claim against the Hy-Vee supermarket chain for making use of his graffiti mural in one of its TV commercials. The spot, which first aired ...
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 ...
I’ll tell the story again. This blog began the day a friend of mine—a very smart one—shared an article on Facebook that was patently untrue. When I confronted him about this, he responded that he cared more about the “issue” than the veracity of the article. The double-take triggered by his cognitive dissonance led me to poke around and discover that the false ...
A new business called OmniQ has filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to grant cert in ReDegi v. Capitol Records, alleging that the Second Circuit’s opinion in December 2018 effectively brings an end to the First Sale doctrine. The company is developing a patent pending model that (presumably) would facilitate an online market for “used” and hard-to-find motion pictures. Its brief ...
