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 ...
In my recent post about the McCloskey photograph, I said that courts tend to favor a photographer’s right to capture and distribute an image, even in situations involving fairly substantial privacy invasions in order to obtain photographs of limited news value. What I had in mind was the kind of paparazzi who aggressively pursue celebrities (especially women), and I was ...
The shoe is on the other foot with me as interview subject. In this podcast, I talk with Pilar Alessandra, founder and instructor of the internationally known On the Page® consulting and teaching program for screenwriters. Yes, the occasion for the interview is the release of my new book Who Invented Oscar Wilde? The Photograph at the Center of Modern ...
There are a lot of posts going around lately about that photo. You know the one. It depicts St. Louis attorneys Mark and Patricia McCloskey standing locked and loaded—he with an AR15, she with a Bryco Model 38 handgun—in front of their large house on the afternoon of June 28th. That was the day when approximately 500 protestors, in response ...
On October 7, the Supreme Court finally heard oral arguments in the decade-long copyright software slugfest Google v. Oracle. Thomas Goldstein represented Google, Joshua Rosenkranz represented Oracle, and Deputy Solicitor General Malcom Stewart represented the United States as amicus curiae in support of Oracle. The major arguments discussed were the following: whether the Java declaring code Google copied into the ...
