As we batten down the hatches to weather the present storm, streaming entertainment enters the foreground of our new and temporary reality in which we voluntarily circumscribe daily life to the confines of home. This is no time, of course, to fuss about media piracy per se. We have bigger fish to fry, but one must keep busy, and so ...
According to a September 2019 story in the New York Times, the volume of online content described as “child sexual abuse material” grew from 3,000 reports in 1998 to 45 million in 2019. What used to be called “child pornography,” which was bad enough, needed a broader term to encompass material that increasingly contains photographic and video content depicting torture and ...
Not everyone agrees that copyright law has a natural-rights soul, but neither critics nor proponents dispute that copyright’s heart is to provide incentive for authors. Specifically in Google v. Oracle, the headlines most likely to seep into general awareness will boast one of two competing predictions regarding this incentive principle. Defenders of Google insist that if Oracle wins this case, ...
Editor’s Note: Thirty-two amicus briefs were filed with the Supreme Court in support of Oracle in Google v. Oracle. Among these was one written by Steven Tepp, whose credentials include former Senior Counsel at the Copyright Office, and whose brief was signed by several other copyright experts from both the public and private sectors. On February 21, Jonathan Band, on ...
Early last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee held the first in what will be a year-long series of hearings (roughly one per month) to review the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Almost as old as the publicly-available internet itself, the 1998 DMCA expressed the best efforts of Congress to predict how the digital market might evolve and to, therefore, strike a balance ...
