Posted on August 31st, 2009 by William McGeveran
I still subscribe to my local newspaper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, in dead-tree form. One evening in early August, just before my vacation, as I perused the ever-shrinking opinion page, my eye ran across this headline: “MEDIA, OLD AND NEW ‘FREE-RIDING’ AND COPYRIGHT.” The authors, Dan and David Marburger, argue that news aggregation web [...]
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Filed under: Blogging, Copyright, Court Decisions, Digital Media, First Amendment, Intermediaries, Internet & Society, Media, Minnesota
Posted on August 27th, 2009 by Tim Armstrong
I spent the summer finishing up a paper that I have been working on (off-again, on-again) for the better part of a year. The result is Shrinking the Commons: Termination of Copyright Licenses and Transfers for the Benefit of the Public, and it’s now available on SSRN. Readers of this blog with an interest in [...]
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Filed under: Copyright, Internet & Society, Open Access, Open Standards, Peer Production, Scholarship, Software
Posted on August 17th, 2009 by William McGeveran
Michael Zimmer has updated and re-posted his extremely helpful directions for adjusting Facebook privacy settings. Do yourself a favor, stop what you are doing, go read and follow his instructions.
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Filed under: Anonymity, Intermediaries, Privacy, Social Networking
Posted on August 11th, 2009 by William McGeveran
The ACLU has filed an interesting lawsuit in Georgia challenging the state’s kosher labeling laws. At first I thought the argument was that the state could not crack down on deceptive labeling. But it turns out, as the ACLU’s complaint makes clear, that there is not consensus about the requirements of kashruth among Jews (particularly [...]
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Filed under: First Amendment, Intermediaries, Trademarks
Posted on August 11th, 2009 by Derek Bambauer
The guns in RIAA v. Tenenbaum have gone temporarily silent; now, there’s post-game analysis and preparations for the next phase: challenging the jury’s award of $675,000 in damages ($22,500 per song, at 30 songs). Ben Sheffner’s Billboard column gives a great summary of the fight. Tenenbaum’s side will claim that the Copyright Act’s statutory damages [...]
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Filed under: Berkman, Blogging, civil procedure, Copyright, Court Decisions, Digital Media, Education & Copyright, First Amendment, Internet & Society, Law School, Media, Music, RIAA, Scholarship
Posted on August 7th, 2009 by William McGeveran
I am at the Intellectual Property Scholars Conference at Cardozo Law School in New York City. If you don’t have the good fortune to be here with me, the agenda and paper abstracts are on line. A couple of idiosyncratic highlights for me so far include: Tom Lee’s empirical analysis of how consumers perceive the [...]
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Filed under: Blogging, Copyright, Internet & Society, Law School, Patents, Scholarship, Trademarks
Posted on August 1st, 2009 by Derek Bambauer
As you know, Joel Tenenbaum lost against the RIAA and is now on the hook for $675,000, pending a hearing on the constitutionality of those damages. Several lawyers I’ve talked with have suggested that Judge Nancy Gertner, who presided over the trial, committed reversible error by issuing a directed verdict on the question of infringement. [...]
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Filed under: Blogging, Copyright, Court Decisions, Digital Media, Education & Copyright, Intermediaries, Internet & Society, ISP, Law School, Media, Music, RIAA