When Viacom et al, in 2014, settled their copyright infringement suit against YouTube, that outcome had significant consequences for millions of independent creators. For one thing, the settlement left YouTube and other major platforms to over-emphasize the district court’s summary judgment that the DMCA had fully shielded the video platform against any liability in that case—this despite the appellate court ...
Emergencies have a way of shining a bright light on flawed thinking and dumb ideas. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed latent, and embarrassing, American weaknesses, from the highest levels of government right down to the grocery stores, where Karen and Ken refuse to follow basic public safety rules. All in, it’s been a rather stunning demonstration of national incompetence laid ...
Ever since the case Allen v. Cooper first appeared on my radar, and especially after the Supreme Court handed down its decision in late March, I have been admittedly a wee bit obsessed with the subject of state sovereign immunity (a.k.a. Eleventh Amendment immunity). What is Eleventh Amendment immunity? In a nutshell, it means you cannot sue a state (including ...
(Originally published at Copyright Alliance as part its “Secret History of Copyright” series of blogs.) “Students of the nineteenth-century drama come sooner or later to the realization that the most important dramatist of the period was Shakespeare.” – Marvin Felheim, The Theater of Augustin Daly (1956) – Most people are probably familiar with the word hack as a pejorative for ...
There is one consistent flaw inherent to most anti-copyright agendas. Because so many contemporary theories and attitudes tilting against copyright are largely predicated on the introduction of digital technologies, a false dichotomy persists between access and authorship. Since the days of NAPSTER, authors have endured a litany of techsplaining on the (not quite true) theme that the cost of access ...
