May people know that online service providers are shielded from liability for copyright infringement by their users, meaning that a court will, on summary judgment, often excuse a web platform as a named defendant when an infringement has been committed by its customers. Many people are not aware, however, that a service provider must meet certain conditions in order to remain ...
Anyone who is consistently engaged on copyright issues is used to hearing the rhetoric from the major critics, who say things like We support creators while they advocate policies that will further erode authorial rights. Whether these parties engage in this kind of chicanery in order to sacrifice artists at the altar of Big Tech, or they do it just because they are ...
As noted in Part I, there are a lot of moving parts to this story that cannot be addressed in a single post; but the one thread readers should not lose is the fact that this whole dust up started because Google was the first commercial user since the launch of Java in 1995 to refuse a license agreement. Undeterred ...
In 1990, the Port of Portland received a new container crane—the largest available at the time—built by Hyundai Heavy in Seoul. When the crane arrived, balanced across the beam of this massive ship, I was on site because I happened to be working for a small, Seattle-based industrial production company hired to make documentary films about the crane’s rigging and installation. This ...
Every once in a while, a copyright litigation story makes a fine cautionary tale for users of social platforms, and this is true partly because the conflict tends to spawn misleading headlines or comments that add fuel to an outrage already borne of ignorance. In this case, I am referring to Prince’s estate easily prevailing on summary judgment in a ...
