Last Monday, the world’s largest distributor of audiobooks, Audible, had intended to launch a new service called Caption, a feature that uses voice-to-text transcription technology to display the text of an audiobook on a user’s screen in synch with the narration. In late August, seven major publishers* filed suit against Audible, alleging that the unlicensed Caption feature amounts to copyright infringement ...
As with so many copyright questions, the answer is “it depends.” I stumbled into a discussion on Twitter last week that included some fairly cynical reactions to an artist named Chris Williams, who filed a copyright infringement claim against the Hy-Vee supermarket chain for making use of his graffiti mural in one of its TV commercials. The spot, which first aired ...
After reading the indictment that was handed down last week against the eight men who allegedly ran the pirate streaming service called Jetflicks, all I could do was wonder what the hell they were thinking. Between 2007 and 2017, Krisopher Lee Dallmann and Darryl Julius Polo operated Jetflicks as a subscription-based service, delivering tens of thousands of unlicensed audio-visual works to ...
Most conversations (i.e. arguments) about copyright tend to revolve around artists in the traditional sense—musicians, authors, filmmakers, photographers, etc.—wanting to make a living from their work. To those types of creators, the often dismissive responses from the tech-funded intelligentsia range between feigned sympathy and unvarnished antipathy for any author who would presume to earn her living making “art” in the first ...
In order for copyright law to work for all the Whos in Whoville—the small and the tall—legal reasoning must apply equally whether the plaintiffs are major enterprises or kitchen-table start-ups. While it is understandably common in the court of public opinion to favor smaller defendants being sued by larger copyright owners, the fact is that when an error of law disfavors a ...
