Tag: Copyright
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Rubenfeld on Copyright and the Constitution
October’s Yale Law Review has an interesting article by Jed Rubenfeld, entitled “The Freedom of Imagination: Copyright’s Constitutionality.” (Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer and not a legal scholar, so I’m not fully qualified to judge the scholarly merit of the article. What you’re getting here is my semi-informed opinion.) Rubenfeld argues, convincingly in my view,…
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Crackdown at the Naval Academy
According to The Capital, which appears to be a local newspaper in Annapolis, officials at the Naval Academy have seized the computers of nearly 100 midshipmen (i.e., students at the Academy) because of suspected file sharing activity. Some people paint this as an “RIAA goes after the Navy” story. But based on the newspaper article,…
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Lobbyists to Solve Copyright Problem
Declan McCullagh at news.com reports that “Technology and entertainment lobbyists will sit down at the negotiating table [today] to seek a resolution to the long-running political spat over digital copyright.” The article makes the alarming but unstated assumption that the last Congress’s refusal to pass any “anti-piracy” bills is actually a problem. When Congress rejects…
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RIAA's Anti-Infringement Site Infringes
I swear I’m not making this up. DSLReports observes that the RIAA’s new anti-infringement website, UnitedMusic, contained material copied without permission from a page at the University of Chicago. The RIAA has now removed the apparently infringing material.
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Post-Napster File Sharing at Princeton
Today’s issue of the Daily Princetonian, our student newspaper, reports on file sharing issues on campus. (Note that the article has its facts wrong about the Napster case. Napster was not found to have violated the DMCA. Napster’s legal problems had to do with contributory and vicarious copyright infringement.)
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Compulsory Licensing: Responses
I have gotten several interesting responses to my posting on compulsory licensing of music. Ernest Miller at LawMeme offers a tongue-in-cheek response. (At least I think it’s tongue-in-cheek.) He says that the same logic that supports compulsory licensing of music would also support compulsory licensing of pornography (requiring everybody to pay a tax to support…
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A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come?
On Monday I attended a workshop to discuss compulsory licensing of music. A compulsory license might work like this: a small “tax” is added to the cost of Internet connections and/or computers and/or electronic devices that record and play music. In exchange for paying this tax, everybody gets free access to all the music they…
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Lessig's Post-Mortem on the Eldred Arguments
Larry Lessig offers an extraordinary post-mortem on this week’s Supreme Court arguments in the Eldred case. Lessig deserves our enduring thanks, and a long, peaceful vacation.
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D-Day For Eldred
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court hears oral argument in Eldred v. Ashcroft, the lawsuit challenging the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act, a law that added twenty years onto the life of every current and new copyright. Larry Lessig will argue for Eldred, and Ted Olson, the U.S. Solicitor General, will argue for the government. The…
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Doubletalk from MediaDefender?
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that MediaDefender has been sending cease-and-desist letters to universities, identifying the IP addresses of specific computers that are alleged to be offering copyrighted movies for download. These IP addresses usually correlate one-to-one with users. One of the MediaDefender letters is reprinted in the Chronicle story. The letter says in…