copyright

The cases Capitol Records, Inc. v. Thomas-Rasset The plaintiffs, Capitol Records, Inc., Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Arista Records LLC, Interscope Records, UMG Recordings, Inc., and Warner Bros. Records, filed suit against Jammie Thomas-Rasset under the Copyright Act seeking statutory damages and injunctive relief in the first file-sharing copyright infringement lawsuit ...

The Orphan Works Directive 2012/28/EU was published in the Official Journal of the European Union on 27 October 2012. This post provides an overview of the main provisions set forth by the Directive and describes the approach used by the European institutions in a first tentative step towards tackling the ...

After the failures of Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA), the Obama administration’s Internet Policy Task Force has recently put forward a new proposal to making it a felony to stream copyrighted works, along with a Green Paper and call for comments on the future of ...

The advent of mass digitization via Google Books has ignited a series of copyright-related actions filed by book publishers and authors. There are two issues: whether Google and the owners of affiliated digital libraries are entitled to a fair use defense for library use, including providing access to print-disabled individuals, ...

The Copyright Alert System (CAS) was rolled out in late February 2013. CAS constitutes the United States realization of the international concept of “graduated response programs:” frameworks for media owners to address alleged online copyright infringements with computer users through their Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Key features of CAS – ...

The embittered battle between Dish Network and American Broadcasting Companies has given a public face to the struggle between the entertainment and technology industries over the role of copyright in media. In this battle, however, theoretical copyright interests are secondary to networks’ central business concern: profit. The future of advertising ...

Last Fall, Derek Khanna, then an intern at the Republican Study Committee (RSC) released a policy brief concerning copyright entitled “Three Myths about Copyright Law and Where to Start to Fix it.” Khanna insisted, based on a textualist reading of the constitution, that copyright has become too favorable to the ...

The Supreme Court recently handed down its decision in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, a copyright exhaustion case concerning the sale of “gray-market” works published outside the United States and imported for sale. In a surprisingly decisive 6-3 decision, the Court reversed the Second Circuit’s decision and held that ...

On March 4, 2013, the White House officially responded to an online petition calling for the legalization of cell phone unlocking. The process of unlocking a cell phone usually refers to installing software that allows a cell phone to be used on multiple wireless carriers. Cell phone unlocking had previously ...

The individual defendants in two high profile peer to peer song sharing cases, Capitol v. Thomas-Rasset and Sony v. Tenenbaum, recently faced major defeats in challenges over high statutory damages awarded against them. This raises questions as to the roles of judges and juries in determining the fairness and proportionality of statutory damages in ...