May people know that online service providers are shielded from liability for copyright infringement by their users, meaning that a court will, on summary judgment, often excuse a web platform as a named defendant when an infringement has been committed by its customers. Many people are not aware, however, that a service provider must meet certain conditions in order to remain ...
Every once in a while, a copyright litigation story makes a fine cautionary tale for users of social platforms, and this is true partly because the conflict tends to spawn misleading headlines or comments that add fuel to an outrage already borne of ignorance. In this case, I am referring to Prince’s estate easily prevailing on summary judgment in a ...
When it was announced last week that a jury awarded the major record labels a one billion-dollar-damage award in its copyright infringement case against COX Communications, certain anti-copyright voices were predictably shrill in their astonishment at such a stratospheric number. Specifically, the plaintiffs represented by the RIAA were awarded $99,830.29 per infringement of just over 10,000 songs, which is actually less ...
In response to a recent social media dustup, Mike Masnick writes on Techdirt, “…we’ve got quite a story today about how copyright is a total mess and not really fit for the way the internet works today.” To his credit, Masnick does a solid job describing both the circumstances and the legal mechanisms relevant to a conflict that arose when ...
Now that the holiday shopping season is officially underway, it seems like a good time to talk about counterfeit products; and it may surprise some readers to know that consumers have almost no meaningful protection against the tens of thousands of counterfeiters operating online. At best, a counterfeit product will merely be disappointing; at worst, it will set the house ...
