Not everyone agrees that copyright law has a natural-rights soul, but neither critics nor proponents dispute that copyright’s heart is to provide incentive for authors. Specifically in Google v. Oracle, the headlines most likely to seep into general awareness will boast one of two competing predictions regarding this incentive principle. Defenders of Google insist that if Oracle wins this case, ...
Editor’s Note: Thirty-two amicus briefs were filed with the Supreme Court in support of Oracle in Google v. Oracle. Among these was one written by Steven Tepp, whose credentials include former Senior Counsel at the Copyright Office, and whose brief was signed by several other copyright experts from both the public and private sectors. On February 21, Jonathan Band, on ...
Although it has been my intention to write about Google v. Oracle serially, addressing the legal questions in more or less in the order they are presented and weighed in a court opinion, it turns out today marks the end of Fair Use Week. (How I could have missed that in this otherwise sleepy news cycle is a mystery, I ...
Looking at Google v. Oracle as a consumer and citizen, common sense insists upon a measure of skepticism in response to the premise that the “future of all software development” depends on Google prevailing in this case. Many of those who say so are the same folks who tend to omit the fact that licensing—especially in B2B relationships—spawns innovation all the time. The underlying ...
Early last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee held the first in what will be a year-long series of hearings (roughly one per month) to review the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Almost as old as the publicly-available internet itself, the 1998 DMCA expressed the best efforts of Congress to predict how the digital market might evolve and to, therefore, strike a balance ...
