The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) was dealt a significant (possibly fatal) blow in its longstanding endeavor to have the courts abolish the entirety of DMCA Section 1201 as an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment. The case Matthew D. Green, et al. v. United States Department of Justice was filed in July of 2016, and on December 6, the DC ...
As part of its commitment under the USMCA Trade Agreement, Canada has now extended its copyright term of protection from life-of-the-author plus fifty years to life-of -author plus seventy years, thereby harmonizing this aspect of its copyright law with the United States, the EU nations, the UK, and others. Canadian trade and IP expert Hugh Stephens writes on his blog, ...
One of my first mantras when I started this blog was I hate Twitter, but that was shorthand for the broader view that social media is a trainwreck. Of course, the existential difficulty presented by these platforms is that while they can be highly toxic, as long as the market remains, one must have a presence if one has a ...
I know I’m arriving late to this party. It’s almost Thanksgiving, but it was back on November 3 that two Russian nationals—Anton Napolsky and Valeriia Ermakov—were arrested in Argentina at the request of the United States on charges of criminal copyright infringement, wire fraud, and money laundering. Concurrent with the arrests, authorities seized 241 domains controlled by the book piracy ...
In October, the Supreme Court granted cert in two cases that may limit the immunity granted to internet platforms under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Both Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Tamneh, arise from plaintiffs seeking to hold platforms accountable for “targeted recommendations” of material associated with acts of international terrorism, but in this post, I will ...
