Dear Authors (“the undersigned”): It’s not your fault. You mean well. But you are simply wrong to have signed that letter—the one written and orchestrated by Fight for the Future (FFTF), which misrepresents the case Hachette et al., v Internet Archive as an attack on libraries. If I were not a copyright nerd, and I were told that this lawsuit ...
I have written extensively about state sovereign immunity (a.k.a.,11th Amendment immunity) as it relates to copyright owners’ inability to hold states and state actors liable for recklessly and knowingly infringing protected works. State immunity for violations of federal statutes against persons is a maddening subject—rife with judicial and historical contradictions and implications that reach far beyond intellectual property. Among the ...
Apropos my recent response to the EFF’s standard policy of shrugging at online piracy, I want to highlight one paragraph from the post to which I replied. Katherine Trendacosta wrote: From the fever-pitch moral panic of the early 2000s, discussions about “piracy” disappeared from pop culture for about a decade. It’s come back, both from the side explaining why and the side that wants ...
Welp (as the kids say), it looks like Katherine Trendacosta of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) found an old PowerPoint deck from 2012 and used it to write a new post ominously titled Hollywood’s Insistence on New Draconian Copyright Rules Is Not About Protecting Artists. Typical of the EFF playbook, Trendacosta devotes an entire post maligning the motion picture industry ...
Among the amici who filed briefs in Hachette v. Internet Archive is former law professor and library director Michelle Wu, who, as the brief states, “…is recognized by many as the originator of the legal theory underlying controlled digital lending (“CDL”) ….” With her brief, Wu seeks to defend CDL as a doctrine and asks the court to limit its ...
