Though most people can be forgiven for missing it, two Supreme Court Decisions and a District Court granting a motion for summary judgment made a fair bit of copyright news this week. In a pair of unanimous decisions the Supreme Court settled two statutory disputes relevant to a rightsholders’ ability to enforce his copyrights. And pursuant to findings at the ...
Well, it’s Fair Use Week again. Seventh annual. I suppose one must say something. Though what I really want to say is Why? What exactly happened in 2013 to provoke the idea that we needed this celebration? The fair use doctrine had been part of the federal copyright law for forty years, and its common law precedents began percolating in ...
“Content is king” was the catch-phrase of the 1990s and the heady (headless really) days of the Dot Com bubble. And although that stopped being a slogan with the resurgence of Web 2.0, it was still true. Content was still king except the would-be tech giants figured out that they didn’t need to create content but instead just make someone ...
If the Supreme Court agrees to hear Allen v. Cooper, copyright owners and constitutional scholars will both be watching closely. The practical matter for copyright owners is whether a U.S. State, or agents of a State, may freely use copyrighted works without permission and remain immune from claims for infringement. As of now, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals contends ...
It was encouraging to see our most prominent millennial Member of Congress, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) recognize the link between a healthy democracy a professional class of journalists. On Friday, presumably in response to the startling number of layoffs at BuzzFeed, @AOC tweeted this: True to form, Mike Masnick of Techdirt replied: It is ironically quaint at this point to see ...
