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 [...]

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 [...]

Did the Tenenbaum Judge Botch It?

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. [...]

NYLS Launches Google Book Settlement Wiki

James Grimmelmann and a team of students at New York Law School have launched an elaborate web site called “The Public Index” to facilitate conversation about the proposed settlement of the Google Book litigation. As the site’s home page explains:

Here, you can browse and annotate the proposed settlement, section-by-section. … In addition, you can:

Study our [...]

Bradford and Hautzinger on Digital Statutory Supplements for Legal Education

One of the many interesting presentations I attended at the just-concluded 2009 CALI Conference was a tag-team primer on creating digital statute books and casebooks.  Now, I see that one of the presenters, Professor Steve Bradford of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, has posted on SSRN the paper he discussed at CALI.  Here’s the pithy abstract:
Law students [...]

Open Source and Cloud Computing

My friend and former Berkman co-worker Aaron Williamson, who is a lawyer at the Software Freedom Law Center, was kind enough to talk with my Internet Law class about how open source works in a cloud computing environment. Aaron was good enough to let me post my notes on his talk – with fervent apologies [...]

Best Practices for Law Review Authors?

As UC’s only Copyright specialist, I field a lot of questions from my faculty colleagues each year involving what they can and can’t do in class (things like, “can I hand out this clipping from today’s paper?”) Usually, my answer is simple: “yes, fair use. That will be $32,500, please.” Twice a year, [...]

Don’t Tug on Superman’s Cape

Update: Ben Sheffner has a great post over at Copyrights & Campaigns on this issue. Evidently it wasn’t a DMCA take-down; rather, YouTube’s audio fingerprinting system automatically flagged the work and, following Warner’s settings, removed it. Evidently the poster can fill out an on-line form to protest and, in this case, the video’s been restored.
In [...]

Google Thievery

Google’s a thief. The company steals people’s copyrighted material (Rupert Murdoch); perhaps it’s misappropriating hot news (Associated Press); it’s even planning to replace Maureen Dowd! (Is this bad?) Some comments are even stronger: Robert Thomson of the Wall Street Journal called Google “tech tapeworms,” and The Guardian’s Henry Porter calmly assesses the company as “a [...]

Oh My God, They Killed Copyright!

OK, it’s a weak title, but I needed the South Park allusion. When I was at Lotus, one of the plums was being selected to go to Lotusphere, the annual confab at the Walt Disney Swan and Dolphin resorts in Florida. I went twice (once as podium slave, once as presenter), and loved it for [...]

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