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 ...

For about an hour yesterday, I took a break from the drama unfolding in the Senate Judiciary Committee to tune into the House Judiciary Committee hearing on the CASE Act (H.R. 3945), which would create a Copyright Claims Board at the Copyright Office designed to adjudicate small copyright claims. It was almost hard to believe these two hearings were happening ...

While most attention will be understandably focused this week on the Senate Judiciary and the confirmation (or not) of Brett Kavanaugh, there is actually quite a bit of copyright law activity of note as the midterms approach. Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act Hearings Scheduled Originally introduced in the House in March 2017 as H.R. 1695, this bill proposes ...

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