The Associated Press, Fair Use, and Counting with Cookie Monster

On reading about the dispute between the Associated Press and the Drudge Retort, I wondered immediately if AP had hired the Count from Sesame Street, and whether Cookie Monster blogs.
Copyright fights with bloggers are nothing new. Heck, they even show up in divorce proceedings occasionally. But this looks like serious overreaching by AP, for three […]

An Open Access Success Story, Just in Time for CALI

I’m traveling to Baltimore tomorrow, where I’ll be speaking later this week at UMD, one of the few law schools that can claim to be older than my own. The occasion is this year’s CALI Conference for Law School Computing, and I’ll be delivering an updated version of my talk on the open access movement.
As […]

And Then I Carried You… Into Court.

Fun article in the Washington Post about a copyright dispute over the banal “Footprints in the Sand” poem that’s a favorite of poster stores and greeting cards everywhere. There are at least 3 contenders for authorship of (and copyright in) the poem. Why would anyone be eager to claim credit for this annoyingly trite set […]

What are the Best/Worst “Remixes” of Public Domain Works?

My new project involves examining legal protections for the public domain under United States copyright law. There’s a doctrinal component to that — what does the law say? — as well as a normative component — why should we care? It’s that latter question that I’ve been noodling around lately.
Anyone who looks for […]

Can States Copyright Their Statutes?

Via Boing Boing comes a story about the State of Oregon asserting copyright over its official codification of state laws, the Oregon Revised Statutes. The state’s Office of Legislative Counsel has been sending out C&Ds to groups like Justia and public.resource.org, demanding that they take down their copies of the state laws. The groups are […]

Wal-Mart Execs Behaving Badly: Who Owns the Videos?

Paul Caron brought an interesting piece in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal to my attention: Candid Camera: Trove of Videos Vexes Wal-Mart. The story: about 30 years ago, Wal-Mart hired a small video production firm to record meetings of Wal-Mart’s executives, as well as speeches, shareholder meetings, sales presentations, and the like. The video […]

Harry Potter and the Lexicon of Fair Use

No, it’s not the eighth installment of the Rowling series - rather, it’s the latest installment of the ongoing legal fistfight over RDR Books and Steven Vander Ark’s attempt to publish a book version of the on-line guide to the Harry Potter wizarding world. (I posted briefly on this earlier, when I was annoyed by […]

Is the DMCA Still Relevant?

That’s the question I’ve been asking myself (and, occasionally, others) for most of the last year. (As some of you know, I’ve spent quite a bit of that time working on a new paper about the DMCA, and I’m not jaded enough yet not to feel a twinge of regret at the prospect […]

IP Foolishness Infecting Political Coverage

Continuing our proud tradition here at Info/Law of mercilessly spotlighting journalistic cluenessness in matters of intellectual property (all with the best of intentions! right, guys? …guys?), here’s today’s morsel, from “Inside Higher Ed”: Does Clinton Have a Copyright Problem?. The accusation: Senator Clinton has appeared in front of big campaign banners reading “Solutions for America,” […]

The Perils of Winter Conferences

I’m stuck at CVG, waiting for my repeatedly rescheduled flight to Des Moines for Peter Yu’s 2008 IP Scholars Roundtable. (The weather’s been bad here, and all the outbound Des Moines flights between my originally scheduled one last night and right now have been canceled). If I eventually do make it, it will […]

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