Not that I have any delusions about the reach of this blog, but for what it’s worth, here’s a pro-tip for celebrities everywhere about sharing photographs of yourselves on social media: if you don’t own the rights in the image, don’t post it. This keeps happening. A celebrity posts an image of himself, the photographer who owns the rights in ...
In honor of International Women’s Day, let’s give a tip of the hat to author Margaret Lee, whoever she was. According to Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, Volume 49, November 1899 – April 1900, Miss Margaret Lee of Brooklyn, NY was the “author of sixteen published books, mostly novels.” Her obituary in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 26, 1914, adds a ...
Once again, the question arises whether there is any hope of addressing mass online copyright infringement on otherwise legal platforms? It’s an exhausting problem, more than two decades old, and it isn’t getting better. A recent article by Annie Levin for Observer describes a new campaign by Music Workers Alliance (MWA), in which she sums up the heart of the ...
Justice Breyer, in the waning days of his tenure, wrote an opinion last week that will be of significant help to copyright owners. Historically a critic of copyright, it was Breyer who wrote the convoluted majority opinion in Google v. Oracle, which elided a core copyrightability question presented (the protection of APIs) by shoehorning the question into the second prong ...
Well, here we are again. Fair Use Week. Ninth annual. I still don’t know why this doctrine in copyright law should be observed on the calendar, let alone for a whole week carved out of Black History Month. But in 2013, some anti-copyright ideologues thought it should be a thing, so now it’s a thing. I don’t know. Wear something ...
