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 ...
May people know that online service providers are shielded from liability for copyright infringement by their users, meaning that a court will, on summary judgment, often excuse a web platform as a named defendant when an infringement has been committed by its customers. Many people are not aware, however, that a service provider must meet certain conditions in order to remain ...
As our attention turned to concerns about disinformation, hate speech, and data security after the 2016 election, it became clear that the big cyber policy on deck was going to be a fight about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (1996). For some detailed discussion about this legislation, see posts here, here, and here; but in nutshell, Section 230 ...
Anyone who is consistently engaged on copyright issues is used to hearing the rhetoric from the major critics, who say things like We support creators while they advocate policies that will further erode authorial rights. Whether these parties engage in this kind of chicanery in order to sacrifice artists at the altar of Big Tech, or they do it just because they are ...
As noted in Part I, there are a lot of moving parts to this story that cannot be addressed in a single post; but the one thread readers should not lose is the fact that this whole dust up started because Google was the first commercial user since the launch of Java in 1995 to refuse a license agreement. Undeterred ...
