In his recent testimony before congress, songwriter and president of ASCAP Paul Williams remarked that it was astonishing to realize that he and fellow witness, songwriter Rosanne Cash, were subject to more government regulation than the multi-billion-dollar corporations whose interests were represented in the same hearing. What Williams was referring to with that remark is the fact that licensing fees ...
For quite some time, too long perhaps, a considerable amount of academic scholarship has trended toward focus on copyright’s negative effects, or at least doubt its positive effects, without adequate analysis of the creative process itself. When viewing the market, and especially creators, many academic views I have encountered appear to look solely at finished works, how the market interacts ...
A legal cub named Derek Khanna, rather than finishing his law degree and taking the bar exam, has been steadily transforming himself into something of an anti-copyright celebrity purporting to represent a conservative perspective. And yesterday, he offered this inscrutable editorial, which appeared on Business Insider* among other places. Ostensibly, the article is a criticism of copyright terms (i.e. the length ...
The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act is obsolete, and everybody knows it. The DMCA was the topic in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on copyright review about two weeks ago, and much has been written about its flaws both from pro and anti-copyright perspectives. A recent editorial in The Los Angeles Times leads with a headline “Congress should bring copyright ...
So, what happened this past week is that a jury found that the former owner of a now-defunct music site called MP3Tunes was liable for copyright infringement because he ignored the fact that users were uploading illegal copies to his cyber-locker based site. Safe harbors contained within existing copyright law are designed to protect website owners from this kind of ...
