Tag: DMCA
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District Court Ruling in MDY v. Blizzard
Today, an Arizona District Court issued its ruling in the MDY v. Blizzard case, which involves contract, copyright, and DMCA claims. The claims addressed at trial were fairly limited because the Court entered summary judgment on several claims last summer. In-court comments by lawyers suggest that the case is headed toward appeal in the Ninth…
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DMCA Week: A second orphan works problem?
The orphan works problem in copyright is real and serious. Several congressional hearings and a Copyright Office inquiry that drew hundreds of thoughtful comments—not to mention countless articles and blog posts—attest to that fact. This attention is heartening, and while orphan works legislation seems to have died this year, I’m optimistic that the next Congress…
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DMCA Week: Where's My DVD Jukebox?
A difficult challenge in thinking about public policy is understanding which innovations have not happened as a result of bad government policies. For example, it’s generally believed that the Bell phone monopoly stifled innovation in the telecommunications sector during the 1950s and 1960s. But if we had been assessing things from the standpoint of the…
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DMCA Week, Part I: How the DMCA Was Born
Ten years ago tomorrow, on October 28, 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was signed into law. The DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions, which became 17 USC Section 1201, made it a crime under most circumstances to “circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to” a copyrighted work, or to “traffic in” circumvention tools. In the…
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Lenz Ruling Raises Epistemological Questions
Stephanie Lenz’s case will be familiar to many of you: After publishing a 29-second video on YouTube that shows her toddler dancing to the Prince song “Let’s Go Crazy,” Ms. Lenz received email from YouTube, informing her that the video was being taken down at Universal Music’s request. She filed a DMCA counter-notification claiming the…
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Plenty of Blame to Go Around in Yahoo Music Shutdown
People have been heaping blame on Yahoo after it announced plans to shut down its Yahoo Music Store DRM servers on September 30. The practical effect of the shutdown is to make music purchased at the store unusable after a while. Though savvy customers tended to avoid buying music in forms like this, where a…
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Study Shows DMCA Takedowns Based on Inconclusive Evidence
A new study by Michael Piatek, Yoshi Kohno and Arvind Krishnamurthy at the University of Washington shows that copyright owners’ representatives sometimes send DMCA takedown notices where there is no infringement – and even to printers and other devices that don’t download any music or movies. The authors of the study received more than 400…
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Voluntary Collective Licensing and Extortion
Reihan Salam has a new piece at Slate about voluntary collective licensing of music (which was also the topic of an online symposium organized by our center at Princeton). I’m generally a fan of Reihan’s work, but this time I think he got it wrong. His piece starts like this: What would you do if…
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Slysoft Commercializes Next-Gen DVD Circumvention
We’ve been following, off and on, the steady meltdown of AACS, the encryption scheme used in HD-DVD and Blu-ray, the next-generation DVD systems. By this point, Hollywood has released four generations of AACS-encoded discs, each encrypted with different secret keys; and the popular circumvention tools can still decrypt them all. The industry is stuck on…
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Does Apple Object to iPhone Unlocking?
I wrote Monday about efforts to “unlock” the iPhone so it worked on non-AT&T cell networks, and the associated legal and policy issues. AT&T lawyers have aggressively tried to stop unlocking; but Apple has been pretty silent. What position will Apple take? It might seem that Apple has nothing to lose from unlocking, but that’s…