As I mentioned below, the long-awaited Second Circuit decision in Viacom v. YouTube and its companion case, Football Association Premier League v. YouTube, was handed down today, with the Second Circuit reversing the district court opinion in part, affirming in part, and remanding for another round of summary judgement motions (yeehaw!) consistent with the opinion. [...]

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I just noticed this and haven’t had time to read it, but here it is. Here’s the first paragraph:
Appeal from the judgment of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (Louis L. Stanton, Judge), granting summary judgment to the defendants-appellees on all claims of direct and secondary copyright infringement based [...]

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Hot off the presses and ready for use in your classes this fall, it’s Oliphant and Lloyd’s The Law of Horses, Including the Law of Innkeepers, Veterinary Surgeons, etc., and of Hunting, Racing, Wagers & Gaming, 5th ed.
Chapters include:

Contracts Concerning Horses
Horsedealers, Repositories and Auctions
Horse Stealing, and the Recovery of Stolen Horses
What Diseases or Bad Habits [...]

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David Brooks had an interesting column earlier this week in which he asked, “Why aren’t there more liberals in America?” According to Gallup Poll numbers, about 41% of Americans self-identify as conservative, versus 36% moderate and 21% liberal. This strikes Brooks as a bit of a puzzle, since the financial crisis and the economic downturn [...]

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The House Judiciary Committee held a markup hearing today on the Stop Online Piracy Act, H.R. 3261, the bill that is quickly shaping up to be this year’s big copyright battle. I’ve written two prior posts on the bill, Part I and Part II.
This is a good opportunity to recap where I came out at [...]

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This is the second post in a series looking at the Stop Online Piracy Act. In Part I of this series I looked at Section 102 and concluded that it was largely unobjectionable. Section 102 essentially provides the DOJ with supplemental provisional remedies it can use against sites that are violating U.S. criminal laws but [...]

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The tech blogosphere is abuzz with discussion of yesterday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing on SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, H.R. 3261. (Mainstream news sites seem not to have noticed; the New York Times website front page mentions the impending sale of Yahoo, but not SOPA.) A good deal of that discussion refers to SOPA [...]

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Run program, HAL. HAL, run program. Hello HAL do you read me?
Affirmative, Dave, I read you.
Run program.
I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.
What’s the problem, HAL?
Dave, the publisher of that program cannot be verified. You should only run software from publishers you trust.
I installed that program myself, HAL.
This mission is too important for [...]

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Following on the theme of thoughts that occurred to me as I was teaching Copyright Law this past semester, here’s another. Preparing for the class sessions on substantial similarity, the whole doctrine suddenly struck me as just odd. I don’t mean that it’s vague or inscrutable; anyone who has spent more than 5 minutes with [...]

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Brian Frye has an interesting post up over at Concurring Opinions on Friedman v. Guetta, a recent Central District of California case involving an altered photograph of Run-D.M.C. Somewhat like Fairey v. AP, the issues on summary judgement included whether the original photograph was copyrightable and whether Guetta’s use of it was fair. (You can [...]

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Quick, which service do you think has the most strict password requirements I’ve ever encountered? My bank? Mutual funds? My law firm network login? Credit cards? Paypal? Email providers? Configuring my home server for remote access? Electronics sites like newegg.com and amazon.com? Westlaw and Lexis?
No. Not any of those. There is a service that, judging [...]

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I’m a bit slow in posting this, but last Friday I heard this interesting interview with John McCrea of the band “Cake” on NPR’s All Things Considered. This part caught my attention: the host, Melissa Block, noted that Cake’s album “Showroom of Compassion” debuted on the Billboard 200 chart at No. 1—the catch being that [...]

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“Source Code,” starring Jake Gyllenhaal:
is just a gussied-up (and longer—hmmm) version of “Cause and Effect.” The answer is 3.

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I have a new post up at Prawfsblawg (and the Marquette Law Faculty Blog, if you prefer WordPress), on how the idea that contributory copyright infringement is based on enterprise liability from tort law got started. If that’s something you’ve always wondered about, it may be worth a read.
Side note: For crazy origin stories, see [...]

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Let’s say you’re the plaintiff in a civil case against a neighbor, an employer, or a company you’ve done business with. And let’s say that you have a Facebook account. The other side believes that some of your Facebook communications might be relevant to the case, so they specifically request access [...]

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(Part 2 of 2) I fully expect that we will get some resolution to several important plot threads in Lost’s finale tonight, particularly matters that have been developed over the last season and Season 5’s finale: what “sideways world” is, what Desmond is up to, how MIB is going to be defeated, what happens to [...]

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(Part 1 of 2) Back when I was a teenager, I used to play Dungeons & Dragons with a group of friends. D&D, for those who have never played it, is essentially a pen-and-paper version of World of Warcraft. Instead of a computer running the game, that role in D&D was served by a person—the [...]

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Over on Concurring Opinions, Dave Hoffman has an interesting post concerning a fantasy author, George Martin, who has somewhat peculiar notions concerning copyright and fair use. In the course of explaining why, in his view, science fiction and fantasy authors must sue to shut down fan fiction wherever they find it, Martin cites as anecdotal [...]

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The Second Circuit has vacated Judge Batts’s preliminary injunction in Salinger v. Colting, the “Coming Through the Rye” case. I have not read the opinion, but this snippet from the introduction seems significant:
We hold that the Supreme Court’s decision in eBay, Inc. v. MercExchange, L.L.C., 547 U.S. 388 (2006), which articulated a four-factor test as [...]

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Some April Fool’s Day reading:
Eric Goldman is not a fan.
Larry Solum is, and managed to fool me for the third year in a row! Lots of inside baseball, but these are pretty well done.
Google makes fun of its own trademark (see esp. the handy guide for how to use the name of their company at [...]

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