The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act is obsolete, and everybody knows it. The DMCA was the topic in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on copyright review about two weeks ago, and much has been written about its flaws both from pro and anti-copyright perspectives. A recent editorial in The Los Angeles Times leads with a headline “Congress should bring copyright ...
So, what happened this past week is that a jury found that the former owner of a now-defunct music site called MP3Tunes was liable for copyright infringement because he ignored the fact that users were uploading illegal copies to his cyber-locker based site. Safe harbors contained within existing copyright law are designed to protect website owners from this kind of ...
Silicon Valley lawyer and tech-industry activist Marvin Ammori wrote a strange little blog post that appeared a few days ago on Slate in its “Future Tense” section. In an attempt to be cute, Ammori likens some unnamed body of Hollywood “copyright lobbyists” to a stalker ex-boyfriend who won’t take the hint that nobody wants him around anymore. It’s an obnoxious ...
Here’s the latest java jive: Green Mountain Coffee manufactures the Keurig, single-cup coffeemaker, and last week the company made the announcement that it would use a DRM-like technology to prevent customers who’ve bought their machines from using any K-Cups other than the Green Mountain brand. We all recognize this as the personal printer business model — make the machine pretty ...
This morning, music industry attorney Dina LaPolt and Aerosmith front man Steven Tyler submitted written comments to the USPTO on the subject of compulsory licensing for remixing and sampling musical works. At issue is a green paper submitted by the US Department of Commerce Internet Policy Task Force that copyright reform could include a measure that would effectively mandate artists ...
