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Via.

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Today, a federal district court in New York granted YouTube’s motion for summary judgment in its long-running litigation with Viacom. Viacom and—separately,—the English Premier League sued YouTube and Google alleging that they were liable for infringing works that users posted on YouTube. Google is understandably trumpeting its victory though it of course is subject to [...]

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A little over a month ago, AT&T released a TV commercial that is based on the idea that AT&T “blankets” the US with the coverage of its cellular network.  The commercial shows bright orange fabric covering buildings, dams, beaches — basically the entire US.  You know what happened next:  Loud complaints from fans of the [...]

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I have just finished reading Bobbi Kwall’s new book, The Soul of Creativity, which sets out a plan for ways in which the United States might revisit the idea of adopting a moral rights agenda, but perhaps in a more palatable way than has been suggested in the past – with significant deference to [...]

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Added to the blogroll and to my blog reader:  theParetoCommons, a new group blog about law, policy, and regulation.  According to one of the contributors, Duke’s Kim Krawiec, her colleague Lawrence Baxter “to combine the notion of Pareto efficiency and the complexity of regulating the commons in any industry (financial, environmental, communications, health care, etc.).”  [...]

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From today’s NY Times, and a story about a raid by Mexican authorities on shops selling piñatas that resemble famous cartoon characters, such as Spider-Man, without permission from the relevant rights holders, comes the following quotation that distills a key argument about IP rights in terms that any lay person can understand:
“A piñata is Mexican,” [...]

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I just saw a screening of the film “Whiz Kids,” which was a wonderful tour of the lives of three high school seniors in a science competition (the Intel Science Talent Search). And talk about topical–one of the protagonists even takes on a multinational corporation that is despoiling her local water supply! If [...]

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“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work,’ Woody Allen said, “I want to achieve it through not dying.” The “Singularity University” is attracting Silicon Valley glitterati who think along the same lines:
[T]he Singularity — a time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life [...]

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I have recently noticed that my iPhone, once slow, is downright glacial post-mass-iPad adoption in the greater NYC area. Daniel Altman, among others, has also noticed the AT&T network slowdown. But it’s not just the iPhone–internet connections I’ve used in both New York and New Jersey seem slower than usual. Is [...]

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I just came across this story in The Hollywood Reporter Online (where I also recently guest blogged about Twilight, fair use and copyright norms) – probably nothing to brag about…
In a new blog post, Eriq Gardner recounts a story of Summit Entertainment (the movie studio that holds the movie rights to the Twilight series) suing [...]

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Having just attended the Privacy Law Scholars’ Conference a couple of weeks ago, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to protect our private personal information from those who might use it to harm us.  However, I’ve just read an interesting take on the “personal information” issue, Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell’s recent [...]

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The World Cup finals begin in two days, so there is more football blogging to be had.  Today’s topic:  Innovation.  Does football have too much of it, too little of it, or just the right amount?
This sort of question is often raised in the middle of debates about the relationship between intellectual property law and [...]

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Given the recent series of posts on the effects of technology on the brain, I thought I might share a little neuroscholarship. As Geert Lovink writes, “the neurological turn in recent web criticism exploits the obsession with anything related to the mind, brain and consciousness,” and I haven’t been immune. My recent [...]

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I just came across a story by NPR’s Margot Adler from February, where she admits to being a vampire book fan and creates a list of her Top 75 vampire books.  Do those who follow vampire books agree with her list?  Apologies to those who hate Twilight because they seem to be at the top [...]

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I’ll take a break from football blogging to adopt and extend Jacqui Lipton’s post about the continuing existence of something called “Cyberlaw.” I do not think that cyberlaw is dead; read, for example, Ann Bartow’s insightful review of Jonathan Zittrain’s recent book, which I noticed initially courtesy of a post by Rebecca Tushnet.
If cyberlaw isn’t [...]

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In a futile attempt to break up the soccer blogging (no offense, Mike!), I wanted to raise something Mike and I were recently talking about.  Is there still room for a scholarly field called “cyberlaw”?  Or have we reached the point where cyberlaw scholarship has more or less collapsed into other fields like IP, privacy, [...]

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Today’s law-and-soccer post involves a quasi-moral rights problem.
Rafael “Rafa” Vergara Hermosilla is a  Mexican Miami-based singer, songwriter, and music producer who was asked by Universal Music to produce a Spanish-language mix of an existing song — Wavin’ Flag by K’naan — for use by Coca-Cola as part of Coke’s World Cup marketing. (Coca-Cola calls the [...]

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In member states of the European Union, the answer is yes, sort of.  I picked up this item from a recent New York Times report about the state of broadcast rights regarding the World Cup finals:
European cultural regulations still require key games of national interest to be shown on free television. Generally, those include the [...]

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