Death Knell for Google Books Settlement?

The class action lawsuit against the Google Books program has receded from its former prominence in news reports, but there has still been a lot of activity. The parties retreated into seclusion to negotiate a settlement last fall and then, faced with objections from the Department of Justice, negotiated some more and reached a new [...]

Juries and Fair Use

The Harvard Crimson’s Xi Yu has a good article today about the Tenenbaum case and its prospects on appeal. She kindly asked me for my thoughts on the case’s future. I want to expand a bit on how I see fair use. (Ah, yes, a “clarification” – I haven’t felt so much like a politician [...]

The Fair Use Hammer

The Joel Tenenbaum – RIAA case has produced a terrific opinion by Judge Nancy Gertner of the District of Massachusetts. (Hat tip: Ray Beckerman.) This is the most thoughtful, balanced, and insightful copyright opinion I’ve read in years. Its treatment of fair use is nuanced and careful, and it is required reading for anyone who [...]

Cybersieves

My article Cybersieves is now available in the Duke Law Journal. The team at Duke did a superb job editing and improving the piece, and I’m grateful. The abstract is:
This Article offers a process-based method to assess Internet censorship that is compatible with different value sets about what content should be blocked. Whereas China’s Internet [...]

The Fight to Free Subway Data

Chris Schoenfeld of StationStops has a post up about his battle to get the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority to let him use its schedule data in his iPhone app. Brooklyn’s Law Incubator and Policy Clinic (BLIP) played a big role in Chris’s successful battle, and I’m very proud of the work that the BLIP [...]

Ellen’s Dances: Infringing?

Reuters reports that he major record labels have sued the producers of The Ellen DeGeneres Show because they do not secure copyright permission to play the songs when Ellen dances around like a goof (and sometimes her guests do too).
I draw three lessons:
1. When someone accuses you of infringement and asks why you did [...]

Invasion of the Copyright Parasites

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 [...]

“Shrinking the Commons”: Today, Linux is open-source. Tomorrow, …?

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 [...]

Is $22,500 Per Song Unconstitutional?

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 [...]

Some IPSC 2009 Highlights

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 semantic or [...]

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