Artnet recently published an article about a lawsuit that Janine “Jah Jah” Gordon filed against artist Ryan McGinley, in which she claims that 150 of McGinley’s photographs infringe her copyrights.  Included in the lawsuit is the image on the right below, which was used in a Levi’s advertisement (Levi Strauss is a named co-defendant in [...]

[Read more →]

Further to Greg’s post on the Brown v EMA decision, I thought it might be worth mentioning, by contrast, the position in Australia where violent and sexually explicit video games have typically been banned from sale within the country.  The federal and state governments are now considering the introduction of an R18+ rating for these [...]

[Read more →]

Someone asked me a question yesterday that I just couldn’t answer so I thought I’d try it out here.  As many of us know, the U.S. is unique in having a copyright registration system.  In other countries, there is no need to register a work in order to obtain statutory remedies etc.  This decreases the [...]

[Read more →]

But how you free it is another thing… Man accused of hacking millions of papers at MIT (H/T Orin Kerr)

[Read more →]

A recent decision by Magistrate Judge Ryu of the Northern District of California prompts me to write about what should be a basic requirement of any lawsuit against users alleged to have participated in the exchange of copyright protected works using the BitTorrent peer to peer technology: that the defendants have participated in the same [...]

[Read more →]

A nature photographer named David Slater left a camera unattended, and macaque monkeys tripped the shutter.  The resulting photographs are undoubtedly copyrightable works of authorship, but who owns the copyrights?
Techdirt reported on the question a few days ago and included copies of some of the photos in its post.
For its trouble, Techdirt received a request [...]

[Read more →]

[Post title playing on Mike's post re Harry Potter...]
In my article written a few years back about Google, trademark, and search regulation, I used “Cars” (more or less randomly) as a representative search term with both a trademark and a descriptive meaning.  I found it interesting that about half of Google’s results were for automobiles [...]

[Read more →]

The E.U. Parliament has just adopted a Directive that is intended to better protect consumer rights in relation to digital content.  The text of the Directive is available here.  There is also a summary by Natali Helberger here.

[Read more →]

A handful of people in the United States — delirious, I suspect, on account of last Sunday’s epic win by the American women’s National (soccer) team — are unaware of the impending US release of the eighth and final Harry Potter film this coming Friday, July 15. Everyone else has bought their tickets [...]

[Read more →]

The battle to define fair use for lay purposes continues.  Back in April, YouTube posted a “Copyright School” video, explaining the limits of fair use in YT terms and making attendance at “Copyright School” mandatory if YT receives a takedown notice in connection with a user’s video.  Completion of “Copyright School” removes a strike from [...]

[Read more →]

I just returned from a couple of weeks visiting family back east, where “visiting family” is construed as “driving a couple of hours each day to different locations (locations that all seemed so close to each other when you were back in Texas), where you spend inadequate amounts of time with inadequate numbers of people, and [...]

[Read more →]

I stopped by the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth yesterday, and wandered into the gift shop where I was met with something that made me laugh.  The Modern either has a great sense of humor, an astute awareness of legal disputes, a misconception of source, or a shelf for things-related-to-balloon-animals.

[Read more →]

But I don’t have any interest in “liking” or “friending” TUMS on Facebook, unlike over 45,000 other Facebook users (at last count). I am not going to help TUMS further monetize indigestion via “a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers.”
TUMS is also on Twitter.

[Read more →]

Despite the ubiquity of the Internet, people still do a lot of traveling in meet space, and we aren’t always happy about that. Today I ran across a list of The 19 Most Hated Companies in America. If you fly often, or at all actually, it will not surprise you to learn that four of [...]

[Read more →]