Although this week marks the eighth annual observation of Fair Use Week, I remain unconvinced that the fair use doctrine is any better understood today than it was before this ritual began. I see fair use errors all the time—e.g. in chat threads where creators are trying to do the right thing—and I maintain that it is often the fair ...
The Bernie meme has been a lot of good fun and probably the kind of release valve many of us needed by the time we arrived battered, exhausted, and relieved to watch a peaceful Inauguration Day. My personal favorites are Bernie Merch Table, Bernie Yalta, and Bernie Chicago. And by now, almost everyone knows that Sanders’s campaign team had sweatshirts ...
It is admittedly difficult, maybe even a bit ridiculous, to think about a policy matter as arcane as copyright law when the headline story of the moment is an attempted coup d’etat—let alone one fomented by the President of the United States and endorsed by some Members of Congress. But against the backdrop of existential threat from within, I am ...
Shortly before Christmas, the Senate Judiciary Committee released the discussion draft of a bill to amend the copyright law, primarily the sections known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. There is something in the proposals for everyone to like or hate, but it is important to keep in mind that this is the starting point for what will ...
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 ...
