2nd Circuit: A Copy that Exists for 1 Second is No “Copy” at All

I’m late to the party celebrating the Second Circuit’s terrific new opinion in Cartoon Network LP v. CSC Holdings, Inc., which is the appeals court’s caption for the case formerly known as 20th Century Fox v. Cablevision. As readers of this blog might recall, I joined an amicus brief in the case, limited to [...]

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 [...]

How Drunk Can You Be and Still Drive a Supertanker?

Pretty drunk, apparently. The key issue is whether you’ll drive it well, or instead plow into a reef and spill millions of gallons of oil into a fragile ecosystem.
My friend and colleague Colette Routel has written an amicus brief on the Exxon case (that’s the Exxon Valdez case). She’s also explained the case to the [...]

New Bill Would Immunize Church Super Bowl Parties

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, as they say. Last year, Bill blogged here about the NFL’s efforts to bully churches into stopping their members from gathering together to watch the Super Bowl. Fast forward twelve months, and we learn … that the NFL is trying to bully churches into [...]

Well, Someone at Nixon Peabody Isn’t a Winner…

There has been extensive commentary and derision around the legal blogosphere about a preposterous corporate song commissioned by the law firm of Nixon Peabody, and then the firm’s subsequent efforts to threaten those who mocked it with IP saber-rattling. David Lat first posted the song, and here he summarizes the ensuing flapdoodle. A [...]

New AACS Key Knocks Professor’s Blog Offline?

Professor Ed Felten’s Freedom to Tinker blog is one of the must-read sites in the cyber/IP field (helpfully listed right there in our blogroll, see?), expertly blending the technical perspective of computer science with a solid appreciation of legal principles. But if you visit the site at the moment, you’ll get only a blank [...]

Using Disney Characters to Teach Fair Use

This clever video stitches together tiny snippets from more than two dozen Disney films in a ten-minute primer on the basics of federal copyright law and the fair use doctrine. The one-clip-per-spoken-word style is a little jarring and hard to follow at first (well, it was for me, at least), but you will become [...]

Orwell Rightsholder Considers Suit Over “Hillary 1984″

I wrote before about why Apple might not prevail if it sued the maker of the “Hillary 1984″ video, which remashed a classic Apple commercial to attack Senator Clinton’s presidential candidacy. But I acknowledged that it was a close call.
This, however, is not a close call: Gina Rosenblum, who claims to own TV and [...]

Intuit Disses Law Prof for Saying “Tony Danza”

My colleague, Professor Adam Steinman, has written widely and thoughtfully on federal civil procedure. Like certain other law professors, however, Adam is a (frustrated?) musical artist. Adam recently found a potentially lucrative outlet for his creativity: he entered Intuit’s clever TurboTax Tax Rap contest, and a shot at a $25,000 payday, with the [...]

Webcast of “Google In Court: Copyright and the Universal Library”

The Webcast of Google In Court: Copyright and the Universal Library is now available from Wayne State University Law School’s Web site.  (You need RealPlayer to open the file.)  The event was a huge success; Professors Oren Bracha, Hannibal Travis, and Diane Zimmerman gave thoughtful presentations on Google’s copyright issues, and we had a spirited [...]

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