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 [...]

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. [...]

Tenenbaum Liable for Copyright Infringement

Update [31 July 6:50PM]: $22,500 per work; $675,000 total. More than I expected. Props to Wendy Seltzer and Mark Lemley for the update. Link is to Ben Sheffner’s write-up in Ars Technica…
The judge in the copyright infringement lawsuit against Joel Tenenbaum has issued a directed verdict on the issue of infringement liability. The only remaining [...]

Fair Use Out in Tenenbaum Case

Copyrights and Campaigns has the breaking story. Wow. My initial take is that the outcome is correct – fair use just doesn’t cover what Tenenbaum did – but I need to read the summary judgment order for a more thoughtful analysis. This is fascinating stuff.

Eye-Popping Statutory Damage Award in File-Sharing Retrial

Last year, the trial judge who presided over the trial of accused file-sharer Jammie Thomas suggested that the jury’s award of $222,000 in statutory damages in the first trial may have been excessive.
So it’s interesting to speculate what the judge might make of the damages a jury just awarded to the record label plaintiffs in [...]

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 [...]

Norm-Shifting Litigation

It was the end of an era when the music industry announced late last year that it would end its five-year campaign of filing tens of thousands of copyright infringement lawsuits against end-users of peer-to-peer file-sharing software in favor of a new plan that relied more heavily on intermediaries, such as internet service providers, to [...]

Copyright Filtering in the Stimulus Bill?

[UPDATE: The agreement on the stimulus bill excludes the copyright filtering language. The proposal is not, of course, dead. So a letter to your representatives is still worthwhile, although now less urgent.]
Through the good work of advocacy groups like Public Knowledge, efforts to add legal approval of copyright filtering to the economic stimulus [...]

PRO IP and Silence of the Profs?

The House and Senate easily passed, and President Bush signed, the PRO IP Act. Some commentators have been critical of the Act (Public Knowledge, TechCrunch, Declan McCullagh) – but to no avail. However, IP profs (at least, those who blog) have been pretty quiet about the Act. I can conceive of at least three possible [...]

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