It’s another Independence Day weekend, and I can’t help but notice that we find ourselves this year grappling with some unfortunate consequences of liberty run amok. We’ve got open-carry nuts sporting assault rifles in department stores and coffee shops to prove how free they are; and we’ve got the supreme court granting business owners the right to discriminate against employees ...
This week, I sat on a panel at Harvard University as part of on-going series of roundtable discussions hosted by the USPTO about a variety of copyright issues in the digital age. The topic of our conversation was whether first sale doctrine ought to be expanded in the digital age. In case you don’t speak lawyer, first sale doctrine has ...
NOTE: Apologies in advance for the American-centric post, but what follows can only universally apply in the context of U.S. copyright law. Certain prominent figures making proposals for more limited copyright protections like to repeat the slogan, “We are all authors/creators now,” meaning now that we have the Internet and social applications designed to facilitate easy sharing of all sorts ...
It’s science. Deal with it. We hear an awful lot about how copyrights on creative works “stifle innovation,” preventing new business opportunities from launching or thriving. And the self-serving advocates of these “new” ideas love to describe those of us who question their proposals as anti-technology, anti-progress, stuck in old models, and so on. But the idea that a digital ...
A legal cub named Derek Khanna, rather than finishing his law degree and taking the bar exam, has been steadily transforming himself into something of an anti-copyright celebrity purporting to represent a conservative perspective. And yesterday, he offered this inscrutable editorial, which appeared on Business Insider* among other places. Ostensibly, the article is a criticism of copyright terms (i.e. the length ...
