for everyone

On Thursday the Senate is scheduled to meet and determine which bills should move forward. One such bill is S.3325, The Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008. Make no mistake, this bill is to increase government involvement in intellectual property enforcement and to enhance  remedies for violations. A couple of highlights from this [...]

Earlier this week we found out that JK Rowling and Warner Brothers were successful in their copyright infringement case against RDR Books for their planned publication of The Harry Potter Lexicon, an encyclopedia about all things Harry Potter. Everyone was quick to discuss the decision, including The NY Times, WSJ, TechDirt, Stanford Law School, The [...]

First it happened in Oregon, where the state claimed it violated copyright for websites like Justia to republish their law. According to TechDirt, “the state admits that the text of the laws are not covered by copyright, but that everything else about the way the law is presented is covered by copyright (such as the [...]

Judge Howard Lloyd of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed a copyright infringement case against Veoh, a video sharing site, ruling that the DMCA does not require such sites from reviewing the content they host for potential infringement. The judge said, “The DMCA was intended to facilitate the growth of [...]

Erick Schonfeld at Techcrunch proposes a “Digital Bill of Rights” with: The Right to Use and Reuse Content: Consumers know that digital copies of songs, words, and videos are qualitatively different than physical copies, yet copyright law treats them the same way. When the economics of scarcity no longer apply, consumers start to behave differently. [...]

Last week the EFF achieved a victory against Universal Music when a judge ruled that Universal should have considered fair use before filing a DMCA take-down notice for the infamous Prince/baby-dancing video. Because Universal Music reviewed the baby-dancing video in order to identify “Let’s go crazy” playing, the judge noted “that it wasn’t any sort [...]

I’m starting this blog to examine the increasingly complex world of copyright, fair use, and electronic publishing — and how it all relates to the general public (like me) and business. I am of course writing from my own perspective, not that of my employer, and I hope to disseminate the key ideas that influence [...]