Just in case anyone ever needs this, or a little entertaining reading on a weekend afternoon: a rather cool searchable database of U.S. court cases dealing with popular music (including copyright cases, of course). Each case is introduced with a plain-English and sometimes lighthearted summary. This isn’t your usual legal site. Even the name says [...]
Yes, there is such a thing as works that entered the Public Domain but subsequently had their copyright restored. I won’t try to explain, I’ll let Edward Lee do the excellent job he does of that in the article here. The interesting part is that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear this case (Golan [...]
Andrew Ainsworth, the industrial designer who designed and made the original stormtrooper helmets for “Star Wars” — and is selling copies (apparently from the original molds) for rather amazing sums — is being charged with copyright infringement by George Lucas. The case has now reached the Supreme Court in the UK. This should be an [...]
A nice little item from Techdirt quoting Francis Ford Coppola quoting Balzac — on quoting. Or copying, to be precise. I once found a little excerpt from Balzac. He speaks about a young writer who stole some of his prose. The thing that almost made me weep, he said, “I was so happy when this [...]
The Net-Censorship Bill is moving too smoothly through Congress. The whole story from the Washington Post, here.
I was waiting for it. It was inevitable. Now it’s happened. GBS freaks (followers of the Google Books Settlement story) like me will recall that the legal challenge to Google’s galactic-size book scanning project was (originally) not so much about how Google would or could use the scanned data, but the fact that Google was [...]
Now it’s official: long copyright terms stifle creativity. If The Economist says so, it must be true: “Why the rules on copyright need to return to their roots.” Food for thought: the original term of copyright in the US was 14 years, renewable for another 14. Techdirt brings up a related idea: “Fair Use Is [...]
There’s a pretty good article in Newsweek on the issue of privacy, proposing the almost obvious idea that privacy is the new online currency, but putting it very well: The genius of Google, Facebook, and others is that they’ve created services that are so useful or entertaining that people will give up some privacy in [...]
“The Day Against DRM will unite a wide range of projects, public interest organizations, web sites and individuals in an effort to raise public awareness to the danger of technology that restricts users’ access to movies, music, literature and software; indeed, all forms of digital data. Many DRM schemes monitor a user’s activities and report [...]
The First Sale doctrine is one of those modest little sub-paragraphs buried in the copyright law whose importance far outweighs its length. It says, in brief, that you own what you’ve bought. Couldn’t be more obvious, right? Think again. There’s a reason it ended up in the copyright statute. Vernor v. Autodesk is a case [...]
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