Picking up on one of the big copyright themes of the month—the re-opened public domain*—scholars James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins were hosted last week by Joshua Johnson on his show 1A, produced by public radio station WAMU in Washington, D.C.  Boyle and Jenkins are leading members of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University Law, ...

Some news hit the fan late last week that certain parties tried to embarrass newly-elected congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by sharing a video of her dancing with college friends on a Boston rooftop, riffing on the 80s film The Breakfast Club to the tune by Phoenix called “Lisztomania.”  Why anyone imagined this would shame Ocasio-Corez is a mystery to me, but ...

Silicon Valley may have done ‘bare minimum’ to help Russia investigation, Senate Intel Committee told …  That headline from CNN, and which was echoed in several news stories that began appearing late Monday, will elicit no surprise among my friends and colleagues working in IP law, privacy, publicity rights, security, and various other matters of justice in the digital marketplace.  ...

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 ...

On January 8 of this year, The Trichordist ran a story that the Huffington Post apparently rejected in which indie musician Blake Morgan describes a closed-door meeting between Spotify executives and a group of musicians.  According to Morgan, he actually had to explain that Spotify’s “product” is not Spotify itself but music—music that Morgan and his friends make, and which ...

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