As many readers know, the EU has been considering various proposals to better protect copyright owners in the European digital market. In all cases, proposed legislation focuses on large, for-profit platforms that reap substantial revenues by exploiting copyrighted works without license or compensation. And as usual, the large, for-profit platforms have sought to describe these proposals in hyperbolic terms—as threats ...
In July of 2016, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit alleging that Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is unconstitutional. More recently, in September, Cory Doctorow announced the EFF’s “Project Apollo” vowing to “end DRM within a decade.” I personally tend to think of such high-drama tilting at windmills as mostly a fund-raising strategy for EFF, ...
Suppose there were a company whose minions went around whacking people in the head with two-by-fours. Then, suppose that in response, the multiple victims of said whacking joined a class-action lawsuit against the corporation and won their case. Now, imagine that rather than any damage award going to the plaintiff class members, the money instead went to various organizations, including ...
In Part I of this response to Raustiala and Sprigman’s paper, I contend that the authors place too much emphasis on the porn industry (namely on one data company’s transformative effect) as a model that can be instructive for other types of creators. Primarily, I believe the authors fail to weigh the substantial differences between porn and nearly all other ...
“It is as if some titanic aberrant genius, uncompromisingly inimical to man, had devoted all the ingenuity of Hell to the making of them. They show grotesqueries of ugliness that, in retrospect, become almost diabolical.” – H.L. Mencken, Libido for the Ugly (1927) A paper published in August by Kal Raustiala of UCLA Law and Christopher Jon Sprigman of NYU ...
