As the copyright small claims provision, the CASE Act, continues to acquire congressional sponsors—96 House Members and 14 Senators to date—the EFF is amping up the scare-tactics with blunt messages asking the average internet user if they could afford a $30,000 fine for copyright infringement. Clearly, the EFF expects this strategy to work because they think people are not smart enough ...
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 ...
In order for copyright law to work for all the Whos in Whoville—the small and the tall—legal reasoning must apply equally whether the plaintiffs are major enterprises or kitchen-table start-ups. While it is understandably common in the court of public opinion to favor smaller defendants being sued by larger copyright owners, the fact is that when an error of law disfavors a ...
After the CASE Act passed the Senate Judiciary Committee* on Thursday last week, the critics hit “Publish” on the blogs they had written with the intent to scare users—doubling down on the narrative that the Copyright Claims Board (CCB) for small claims will lead to a whirlwind of infringement judgments against ordinary and innocent users. I and others have explained ...
Now that the bill creating a small claim provision for independent authors of works is making progress in Congress, EFF has pivoted to its standard late-stage strategy whenever they try to kill legislation: the dissemination of scare-mongering bullshit. I do not mean that I disagree with them. There are not two sides to the story they are telling or considerations ...
