by Lisa Shaftel & John Schmelzer Shaftel & Schmelzer, Advocates & Consultants for Visual Artists Representative Hakeem Jeffries introduced the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act of 2017 (the “CASE Act”) H.R. 3945 in October 2017. The CASE Act was created in response to the Copyright Office Study Report on Remedies for Copyright Small Claims released September 2013. The CASE Act establishes ...
As mentioned in Part II, I didn’t expect to write several posts about this litigation, but it turns out that “Blurred Lines” (Williams v. Gaye) raises several copyright issues—doctrinal, cultural, and historical—worthy of consideration and not easily condensed into a single article. In the first post, I alluded to an editorial written in 2015 by scholars Lateef Mtima and Sean ...
When I saw that this year’s World IP Day/Week celebrates the contributions of women, the first thought that came to mind was a memory of a chance meeting in the Spring of 1986 with a legendary photographer named Helen Levitt. My friend Josh and I were in New York City down from college and were supposed to stop by a ...
It hadn’t really occurred to me until last week that nearly all the cases I happen to have read or written about in the past six years entail obvious appropriations of protected works, usually invoking defenses like fair use. In the digital-tech market, many high-profile lawsuits—especially the ones that may pose an existential threat to copyright—involve new business enterprises trying ...
If for no reason other than the fact that I’m out of monkey jokes, I’m pleased to announce that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has finally put an end to PETA’s ridiculous litigation in which the organization alleged that the Sulawesi crested macaque in the photograph known as the “monkey selfie” is rightfully the owner of the copyright in ...
