I was re-reading Perfect 10 v Google last night (and Perfect 10 v Visa) in preparaton for a cyberlaw class today and I was struck (again) by the 9th Circuit’s desire to maintain a clear distinction between contributory and vicarious liability in the ISP context.  While noting that the lines between contributory and vicarious liability [...]

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Posted at the request of Prof Giuseppina D’Agostino, Director, IP Osgoode, Intellectual Property, Law and Technology Program, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto, Canada:
“(1) We have posted a call for applications for the summer 2010 IPilogue
team and we would be very pleased to hear from students at your own
institution.  The call for editors has [...]

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Many of you will have seen the news that an Italian court has convicted three Google executives with respect to postings of a video by users of the YouTube service showing the bullying of a handicapped child.  Despite the fact that Google employees acted quickly to remove the video, three company officers were convicted in [...]

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Readers of this blog will be familiar with my affinity for vampire stories, and the fact that in recent months I’ve been particularly partial to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga, although I must admit (I’m sure to Mike Madison’s great relief) that my fascination with the series is waning and I’m trying to expand my “literary” [...]

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A while back I blogged about the stated preferences of Stephenie Meyer (author of the Twilight series of books) with respect to online uses of her unpublished manuscripts.  While trolling various authors’ official websites, I found another interesting comment by a vampire book writer about unauthorized uses of her work, this time with direct reference [...]

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While broadening my literary horizons, but still remaining firmly in the pre-teen science fantasy camp, I’ve recently discovered a series of books by Cassandra Clare – the Moral Instruments trilogy (soon to be many more books than a trilogy).  She writes for pretty much the same audience as Stephenie Meyer of Twilight fame so I [...]

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With thanks to Roberto Colon for passing this along to me, a federal court judge in Australia has held that an ISP is not liable for copyright infringements of its users.  Full story here and here.  The Australian copyright test for secondary liability is different from that in the U.S. and relies on a concept [...]

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With thanks for one of my students for fowarding this to me, the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court has today cleared Chinese search engine Baidu on claims of copyright infringement for deep-linking to music downloads that infringe copyrights.  Reuters story here.
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Naturally, I’m still thinking about copyright law in the context of the Twilight franchise – what else would I be doing on a Tuesday morning?  I was looking again at some of the press coverage surrounding the young woman who was detained in custody for several days for making a three minute video-recording in an [...]

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For anyone who couldn’t make it to the domain name/online TM symposium at CWRU in the fall, the webcast is now available online.  Some additional web resources on areas associated with the symposium topics (along with speaker bios) are available on the bottom of this webpage.
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With gratitude to Eric Goldman for drawing my attention to more opportunities to blog about the Twilight franchise, the U.S. District Court in California on January 12 granted a preliminary injunction to Summit Entertainment (the movie studio that produces the Twilight movies) for copyright and trademark infringement in relation to the unauthorized activities of a [...]

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On the way back from the AALS Annual Meeting, I was chatting with co-blogger Deven Desai who will be familiar with this question but I’m not sure that either of us has a clear answer to it.  I was intrigued when Disney released its first full length animated feature with an African-American princess (The Princess [...]

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I always find fair use in the United States trickier than fair dealing in the U.K. and Australia (where I first studied IP law), so I’m often surprised at the confusions about what is and what isn’t fair use in the U.S. because it doesn’t necessarily comport with what I expect.  And I know that [...]

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I’ve been reading up on Wikipedia’s copyright policies lately and found some interesting items tucked away in the Wikipedia copyright policy guidelines and copyright FAQ.  This is not to criticize the people at Wikipedia as they are working to do something really unique and original with little in the way of financial backing.  But as [...]

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According to today’s NY Times, the most pirated movie of 2009 was the popular Star Trek prequel.
The award for “most notorious film piracy”, however, goes to X-Men Origins:  Wolverine which made it to illegal file-sharing avenues on the Internet one month before being released in the theaters.
Other movies that made 2009’s “most pirated” list included [...]

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Further to my recent post on the issue of the women jailed for recording a few minutes of the Twilight sequel, New Moon, it has been announced that the charges against her have been dropped and she has been released from custody.  A news story here contains interesting statements from both the producers of the [...]

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Further to posting on how everyday Web 2.0 citizens relate to copyright law (and continuing my case study on Twilight-related IP issues), I have come across another example of where the popular understanding of digital legal rights is imperfect.  However, in this case, it looks like the copyright law – or something like it – [...]

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I have noticed recently while playing around on YouTube and Google Video seeking exam question fodder that many fans of popular movies and TV shows who make mash-up videos of material from the shows post a notice at the beginning or end of their video saying “no copyright infringement intended”.  It strikes me that this [...]

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In my ongoing attempt to blog exclusively about IP issues related to Stephenie Meyer and the Twilight franchise, here’s a story I just picked up from CNN online.  A 22 year old woman from Chicago faces 3 years in prison for taping 2-3 minutes of the recently released Twilight movie (New Moon) at a birthday [...]

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Cross posted from The Faculty Lounge.
So while enjoying the guilty pleasure of watching the Today show at a hotel room yesterday morning, I – along with the rest of the world – heard the public declaration from favorite Family Ties mom, Meredith Baxter, that she is now officially coming out as a lesbian.  Extract from [...]

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