Oral arguments were presented this week at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Brammer v. Violent Hues Productions, Ltd.  I first wrote about this story in June of 2018 after a district court in Virginia concurred with an incomprehensible fair use defense—one with implications that threaten the interests of copyright owners in every category.  To quote ...

VidAngel.  TVEyes.  ReDigi.   Copyright interests might view these enterprises as the unholy trinity of tech ventures that have attempted in recent years to strain statutory limitations to such extremes that their interpretations would actually vitiate copyright protection itself.  In August of 2017, the Ninth Circuit denied VidAngel’s crusade to push the fair use doctrine beyond any meaningful scope; in ...

In June, I wrote about the deeply flawed ruling in Brammer v. Violent Hues after the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia handed down some rather inscrutable opinions about an otherwise straightforward copyright infringement case.  A production company company called Violent Hues used a photograph belonging to Russell Brammer on a website for the purpose of promoting a ...

Richard Prince is one of the most reviled names in the worlds of photography and copyright.  This is because his career and notoriety are built largely on high-profile “appropriation” art works, which have earned him considerably more income than most artists ever see, including, of course, most of the photographers whose images he has used without permission.   In September ...

As mentioned in my previous post, Article 13 of the EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market is the latest proposal that will “destroy the internet as we know it,” if the statute is ratified in its present form. The #copyright feed on Twitter seems dominated by messages proclaiming the existential toxicity of Article 13, and, as usual, ...

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