Well, it’s Fair Use Week again. Seventh annual. I suppose one must say something. Though what I really want to say is Why? What exactly happened in 2013 to provoke the idea that we needed this celebration? The fair use doctrine had been part of the federal copyright law for forty years, and its common law precedents began percolating in ...
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 ...
ReDigi is a business venture whose revenue model is based on brokering online transactions between sellers and buyers of “used” music files. A prospective seller has a collection of legally-purchased digital files of songs purchased from iTunes that he will never access again, so he places these for sale via ReDigi, which connects him with a buyer. The buyer purchases ...
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 ...
It’s science. Deal with it. We hear an awful lot about how copyrights on creative works “stifle innovation,” preventing new business opportunities from launching or thriving. And the self-serving advocates of these “new” ideas love to describe those of us who question their proposals as anti-technology, anti-progress, stuck in old models, and so on. But the idea that a digital ...
