Archiving our digital heritage becomes more important each day. We all generate an incredible amount of cultural and social content. As I wrote in my article, Property, Persona, and Preservation, “Before one can access, one must preserve.” Thus, I am happy to see what appears to be an movement towards greater preservation of our digital [...]

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The news media and the blogosphere are awash with reports of Pink Floyd’s victory last Thursday in a lawsuit in England against its label, EMI, over the right to distribute digital downloads of individual tracks from The Floyd’s classic concept album, The Wall.  The band insists that both its artistic vision and, more important, its [...]

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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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The law sometimes takes its integrity in its hands when the Federal Circuit gets its hands on a copyright law question, and the Federal Circuit’s opinion the other day in Gaylord v. United States, involving fair use, bears out that proposition in spades.  Gaylord sculpted a column of soldiers as part of the Korean War [...]

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A bit overshadowed by all the hubbub over the oral argument in McDonald v. City of Chicago, the Supreme Court yesterday handed down an important copyright opinion in Reed Elsevier v. Muchnick. (But see Howard Wasserman, Marcia Coyle.) The court held that Section 411(a) of the Copyright Act, which requires registration of a copyright as [...]

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Plagiarism either makes you a bad person, or bad people are plagiarists, or both.  Either way, it’s obviously a moral crime, not an ethical economic one.  This morning brings yet another example of someone made to do penance:
Nick Simmons, the son of the rock star Gene Simmons, sought to make a name for himself in [...]

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Excerpt from a longer video that is accessible here.
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Here!
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Here are two videos about XXX products.  With the Vancouver Olympics in full swing, many of us are extra-attentive to all things Canadian, so the second — which features Canadian native and NBA superstar Steve Nash actually promoting XXX products — is especially compelling.  The IP angle, naturally, is whether anyone thinks that the second [...]

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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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Many may know about the fight between Amazon and Macmillan publishing. Yes it is about e-books and pricing, and the death of an industry, the death of print, and heck throw in Death in Venice if you like. But the real move may have been to highlight something else Amazon is quite worried about: Google [...]

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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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Much is made of the fact that copyright attaches at the time expression is fixed in a tangible medium. To bring us (partially) in line with the Berne Convention, which convention the US joined in 1989, “formalities” of copyright protection — the requirement to give notice by putting the © symbol on the work [...]

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Erich Segal died the other day.  He was famous (or infamous) as the author of “Love Story,” the book and then movie that gave us the line, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”  The movie was a smash but is utterly forgettable; if you’re looking for a throwback experience featuring its star, Ryan [...]

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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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