Although it has been my intention to write about Google v. Oracle serially, addressing the legal questions in more or less in the order they are presented and weighed in a court opinion, it turns out today marks the end of Fair Use Week. (How I could have missed that in this otherwise sleepy news cycle is a mystery, I ...
Last Monday, the world’s largest distributor of audiobooks, Audible, had intended to launch a new service called Caption, a feature that uses voice-to-text transcription technology to display the text of an audiobook on a user’s screen in synch with the narration. In late August, seven major publishers* filed suit against Audible, alleging that the unlicensed Caption feature amounts to copyright infringement ...
Visual artists should be very relieved by last week’s decision at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, overturning the District Court’s finding of fair use in Brammer v. Violent Hues. Frankly, fair use advocates should be happy about the ruling, too, because nobody who sincerely cares about copyright should celebrate an error of law. If a court simply disregards the ...
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 ...
