“Remarkably, the Maryland Act subjects publishers to civil and criminal liability for attempting to exercise their exclusive rights in the very manner envisioned by the federal statute.” – Complaint in AAP v. Attorney General of the State of Maryland. It is inherent to the exclusive rights of the Copyright Act that authors may decide the manner in which their works ...
In April 1787, as James Madison was limbering up his philosophical muscles ahead of the Constitutional Convention, Thomas Jefferson shipped him several crates from Paris filled with books comprising what one might call the Enlightenment in a Box. I mention this footnote of American history only to observe that every book Madison received—indeed every book that ever influenced an American ...
Photo by fotoduki Recently, a tweet caught my eye on the #copyright thread—something about the late Congressman Sonny Bono and a new collection at the Internet Archive, which is the vast digital library founded by technologist and entrepreneur Brewster Kahle. The tweet linked to a blog post by Kahle announcing that a collection of copyrighted works published between 1923 and 1941 ...
Photo by author. In my last post, I opined that the fair use interests of librarians and educators are not necessarily aligned with for-profit business ventures seeking to exploit creative works in ways that can harm authors. For instance, in the case of Capitol Records v ReDigi, now on appeal at the Second Circuit, Jonathan Band filed an amicus brief ...
Not that copyright stories should hope to compete with the drama coming out of Washington these days, but it’s more than likely that copyright policy and news will now be viewed through that multi-faceted, jittery lens; and the political climate certainly provides new context for creating freshly distorted views on various topics. For instance, today begins the 4th Annual Fair ...
