As with the CASE Act, anti-copyright (and even some copyright-neutral) voices reacted on social media to the fact that a bill called the Protecting Lawful Streaming Act (PLSA) was attached to the massive omnibus spending package that passed Congress last night. What this bill will do is make enterprise-scale criminal copyright infringement, by means of digital streaming, a felony rather ...
I have covered the development of the CASE Act in depth. But because the usual gang of anti-copyright zealots began screaming on social media at the news that the small-claim copyright provision was attached to the omnibus spending bill that passed last night, I offer some responses to those allegations about CASE that are factually untrue as well as the predictions ...
Tomorrow (December 18, 2020), the Senate Judiciary Committee will present draft legislation with proposed amendments to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. Whatever is in the draft will probably set someone’s hair on fire—or perhaps everyone’s hair on fire who has an interest in digital-age copyright enforcement. But any initial shouting will then hunker down for the drudgery of ...
As mentioned in my last Google v. Oracle post, the Supreme Court devoted considerable attention during oral argument to addressing the standard applied by the Federal Circuit when it determined as a matter of law that Google’s copying of Oracle’s code was not fair use. Google maintains that the Federal Circuit failed to show proper deference to a jury decision, ...
Among the reasons I defend copyright is that I firmly believe it is inadvertently one of the most profound expressions of democratic principles in the American Constitution. When the Framers essentially transposed English copyright into Article I of the Constitution, they could not possibly have imagined the full value—cultural, economic, and political—of vesting authors, with both the moral and pecuniary ...
