Copyright watchers were surprised when the Supreme Court granted Andy Warhol Foundation’s (AWF) petition for certiorari in its case against photographer Lynn Goldsmith. For deeper background, see older posts, but this is the dispute over Andy Warhol’s “Prince Series” silkscreen images of rock legend Prince made in 1984 using Goldsmith’s unpublished 1981 portrait photograph as a reference image. In March ...
On March 18th, Senators Tillis and Leahy of the IP Subcommittee introduced the SMART Copyright Act. The major functions of the bill, as codified in a proposed new Section 514, would empower the Librarian of Congress to approve designated technical measures (DTM) for identifying infringing material via a triennial rulemaking process. For a detailed description of the proposed rules and ...
Once again, the question arises whether there is any hope of addressing mass online copyright infringement on otherwise legal platforms? It’s an exhausting problem, more than two decades old, and it isn’t getting better. A recent article by Annie Levin for Observer describes a new campaign by Music Workers Alliance (MWA), in which she sums up the heart of the ...
Justice Breyer, in the waning days of his tenure, wrote an opinion last week that will be of significant help to copyright owners. Historically a critic of copyright, it was Breyer who wrote the convoluted majority opinion in Google v. Oracle, which elided a core copyrightability question presented (the protection of APIs) by shoehorning the question into the second prong ...
In this episode, I talk to artists’ rights activists Neil Turkewitz and David Lowery about the scope and nature of fraud in the NFT trade–and why NFTs are yet another false promise to help independent artists in the digital age. Read Neil Turkewitz’s interview with artist bor, a member of the activist group @NFTTheft, and read his follow-up piece about ...
