As many readers know, the EU has been considering various proposals to better protect copyright owners in the European digital market. In all cases, proposed legislation focuses on large, for-profit platforms that reap substantial revenues by exploiting copyrighted works without license or compensation. And as usual, the large, for-profit platforms have sought to describe these proposals in hyperbolic terms—as threats ...
In July of 2016, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit alleging that Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is unconstitutional. More recently, in September, Cory Doctorow announced the EFF’s “Project Apollo” vowing to “end DRM within a decade.” I personally tend to think of such high-drama tilting at windmills as mostly a fund-raising strategy for EFF, ...
Suppose there were a company whose minions went around whacking people in the head with two-by-fours. Then, suppose that in response, the multiple victims of said whacking joined a class-action lawsuit against the corporation and won their case. Now, imagine that rather than any damage award going to the plaintiff class members, the money instead went to various organizations, including ...
In June, I wrote about the deeply flawed ruling in Brammer v. Violent Hues after the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia handed down some rather inscrutable opinions about an otherwise straightforward copyright infringement case. A production company company called Violent Hues used a photograph belonging to Russell Brammer on a website for the purpose of promoting a ...
(This post was first published as part of Copyright Alliance’s Secret History of Copyright Series) “Publishers move without concert, harmony, or agreement. There is no law to regulate their rights, and they have none (which are respected) by courtesy. They print the same book, and the spirit of competition is such as to destroy all correctness, all taste, and all chance ...
