Photo by author. This week the Supreme Court declined to consider the Authors Guild v Google case, which lets stand the Second Circuit Court ruling that Google’s use of scanned published works for its search tool Google Books constitutes a fair use. Various pundits and advocates have hailed this as a victory for the fair use principle. In fact, I ...
In the last week of March, you might have seen a headline or two announcing that 30% of DMCA takedown requests are questionable. And since we don’t always read beyond headlines these days, these declarations happened to be conveniently-timed for the internet industry as the April 1 deadline approached for submitting public comments to the Copyright Office regarding potential revision ...
A couple of posts ago, I reported that the organization Fight for the Future had facilitated enough comments sent to the Copyright Office regarding Section 512 of the DMCA that they “crashed” the servers. In a follow-up email brimming with pride, the organization said this to those who contributed: “Wow! In a matter of days you and nearly 100,000 other ...
As the deadline approached for public comments to the Copyright Office in anticipation of its review of Section 512 of the DMCA, TorrentFreak reported yesterday morning that 50,000 “citizens” chimed in to protest DMCA “abuse,” apparently enough to “crash” the government’s servers. Assuming the crash did occur, it’s probably an endorsement for Copyright Office modernization, but to the matter at ...
(Republishing as the April 1 deadline for comments to the US Copyright Office approaches.) Remember Bill Clinton? If you don’t, he’s that guy who was just in New Hampshire campaigning for his wife Hilary, who’s running for president. Anyway, Bill Clinton was president so damn long ago that when he was first sworn into office, most of us didn’t even ...
