Tag: Copyright

A Reuters story quotes RIAA head Hilary Rosen as saying that ISPs should be held responsible for their users’ file sharing: “We will hold ISPs more accountable,” said Hillary Rosen, chairman and CEO the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), in her keynote speech at the Midem music conference on the French Riviera. “Let’s face…

Siva Vaidhyanathan offers a post-Eldred perspective over at Salon. He’s on television tonight too, talking about copyright, on “NOW with Bill Moyers,” airing on most PBS stations at 9:00 PM. Also check out his new blog.

The Supreme Court has ruled in the Eldred case, upholding the copyright term extension by a 7-2 vote. More later, once I get a chance to read the opinions. majority opinion by Justice Ginsburg; dissent by Justice Stevens; dissent by Justice Breyer

At this week’s Future of Music conference, Terry Fisher of Harvard suggested yet another variation of compulsory licensing for online music. The basic idea is to slap a tax on computers, or on Net access, or on something else you need to get music online. Then the taxpayers can listen to all of the online…

On Thursday I critiqued a New York Times story (which appeared in the print edition on Friday) about the expiration of some European copyrights on recorded music. Joe Liu points out that the Times has changed the story to address one of the issues I raised. The original story said: Defenders of the copyright laws,…

An article by Anthony Tommasini at the New York Times (online) reports that the European copyrights on many musical recordings for the 50’s will be expiring soon. Some paint this as a disaster for the recording industry. This is one of those articles that just cries out for skeptical analysis. Several points leap to mind.…

Over at BoingBoing, Xeni Jardin discusses Ken Hertz’s speech accepting an ACLU Bill of Rights Award. Hertz advocates a compulsory license for online music sharing. (This is something I have discussed (but not endorsed) before.) The significance of this, according to Xeni, is that Ken Hertz has represented several big-name musicians, including Will Smith and…

Siva Vaidhyanathan offers data on the prevalence of the term “fair use” in the media. He counted the number of times that “copyright” and “fair use” were used in the same article in any newspaper (worldwide) listed in Lexis/Nexis. Here’s the data, labeled with some possibly relevant events: 118 in 2001 113 in 2000 20…

Yesterday’s exchange with Ernest Miller got me to thinking about why I didn’t mention fair use in my initial posting. I realized there is another reason that I hadn’t stated before: that I was trying to avoid the rhetorical black hole that fair use has become. A rhetorical black hole is like an astronomical black…

Sasha Volokh tells an amusing story about asking record companies for permission to tape recorded music. Once they realized he was serious, the companies almost all gave him permission and thanked him for asking. We should do more of this. When companies make silly overreaching claims about the extent of their copyrights, don’t just ignore…