On June 1, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a case of a highly clerical nature, but one of particular interest to photographers and other visual artists who typically register multiple works in Group registrations with the Copyright Office. To reduce filing fees and provide some organizational structure to certain applications, the Copyright Office offers various types of Group ...
Justice O’Connor, in Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises (1985), called copyright “the engine of free expression.” This was not a novel idea. The Justice was merely summarizing a well-established relationship between an author’s copyrights and the freedom to express herself as she wishes. Freedom in artistic expression requires that the author have a degree of personal economic liberty, which ...
On June 7 and 8, the membership of the American Law Institute will vote on several sections of the Restatement of Copyright, covering a range of topics, including categories of works, scope of protection, ownership, and transfers of rights. Restatements of Law are the primary work product of the ALI, and the century-old institution has never before embarked on a ...
Last week, I stuck my toe into a little debate on Twitter about the word weaponize, when Professor Cathay Y. N. Smith[1] defended her use of the expression “Weaponizing Copyright.” Smith was citing the title and subject of her own draft paper, and because I still hate Twitter for discussing complex issues, I read the 73-page draft over the weekend. ...
In a paper published in 2020, [1] scholars Danielle Keats Citron and Mary Anne Franks advocate a relatively modest and elegant approach to amending Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996—changes that would directly help the statute’s unintended victims—but it is difficult to imagine how any nuanced consideration of the 230 issue will make headway in the current ...
