RIAA:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/opinion/what-wikipedia-wont-tell-you.html
Mike Masnick’s line-by-line reply:  http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120208/01453517694/riaa-totally-out-touch-lashes-out-google-wikipedia-everyone-who-protested-sopapipa.shtml
 
Hat tip to Lauren Gelman.

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There is an interesting blog symposium at Concurring Opinions about Marvin Ammori’s Free Speech Architecture article.  I am participating in the symposium this week, and here is my first post:
Thank you to Marvin for an excellent article to read and discuss, and thank you Concurring Opinions for providing a public forum for our discussion.
In the article, [...]

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#librarianscode .  Just released:  the newest Best Practices in Fair Use statement from American University’s Center for Social Media (in the School of Communication) and Washington College of Law: The Code of Best Practices for Academic and Research Libraries. The website  has generous amounts of background information and context.  I’ve been a member of [...]

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As reported originally here in Texas Monthly, and most recently here by the TM Daily Post, Robert Earl Keen has taken a creative approach to settling a score (not a lawsuit) with Toby Keith.  (Additional interviews with Keen here and here.)
In an interview with Texas Monthly, Robert Earl Keen discussed the release of his new album, [...]

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Megan’s post about copyright and the muse reminded me to get back to this post that I started to draft a couple of days ago and never got back to because my computer crashed.
As I mentioned in my comment on Megan’s post I’ve been reading a lot lately about the act of creating literary works.  [...]

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On behalf of the editors of JOLTI at Case Western Reserve, some readers may be interested in the following:
Call For Submissions
Case Western Reserve’s Journal of Law, Technology & the Internet is searching for a final article to publish in its spring edition. Any scholarly work related to cyber law, intellectual property law [...]

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I have been thinking a lot about authorship lately.  Perhaps this is because I am learning my first instrument and trying to write my first song.  Or because I failed miserably at a write-a-novel-in-a-month exercise last November.  Or because I am in the middle of a wrestling match with an article.
An interesting episode of the show [...]

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A few years ago I tried to express some anxieties about the rise of a remix culture that valued technology and novelty over timeless content. Those worries resurfaced while I was reading Rob Horning’s recent reflections on his own defensively reactionary tastes:
[T]he key issue is to think about why we choose novelty over immersion. [...]

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[Updated January 15, 2012:  I changed the post title, because I am still learning that search engines dislike non-literal titles.  The original title was "'W"'Stands for Infringement."]
An emerging by-product of Pittsburgh’s claim to be a new entertainment capital (see blog post here – the claim is not entirely without merit, as a lawyer might say) [...]

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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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Another thing I picked up while auditing a publishing course over the break was the statement by an instructor that “If you don’t copyright your manuscript, it is in the public domain.”
Obviously, this is incorrect on a number of levels, and again illustrates how difficult copyright law is to understand even for people who are [...]

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I’ve been auditing a magazine writing/publishing course run through my local rec center over the break, partly for fun and partly to find out how professional and semi-professional writing teachers who are not copyright lawyers understand the nature of authors’ rights.
I wasn’t necessarily surprised at the number of inaccuracies in the lecture on copyright law.  [...]

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Back in October, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell explained the economics of video games as his company sees it. The Geekwire article is worth the read. For now, I’ll point out that he admits “We don’t understand what’s going on” and uses the language of co-creation of value, which I happen to believe is the current [...]

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OK, that title is a riff on a line from The Player. I loved it when the film came out and still do. It says so much of nothing, but captures a vibe that persists. Yet again it seems the film industry is in trouble, or rather doldrums. The Times reports that this year’s box [...]

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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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I feel like I’m scooping Jacqui here, since she’s the Madisonian Twilight expert, but I was so bothered by the recent district court decision in the Bella’s Jacket Brouhaha that I’m chiming in on the intersection of intellectual property and teen vampires.
Twilight is probably part of basic 21st century cultural literacy, so I’ll presume [...]

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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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Many IP profs watch legislation, and we write about the way proposed laws are good or bad or wise or imprudent. I think the way the IP and online space are going will require more on the technology side. For example, the recent debates on the PROTECT IP Bill and SOPA had some interesting comments [...]

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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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“[2] It is undisputed that Liberty Media is a distributor of lawful, albeit hardcore, pornography, and the Motion Picture is itself hardcore pornography. Notably, it is a matter of first impression in the First Circuit, and indeed is unsettled in many circuits, whether pornography is in fact entitled to protection against copyright infringement. Copyright protection [...]

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