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A Requiem for a Lawsuit Signifying Nothing: De Minimis and Fair Use
Insert Pun Here: “Dead,” “Requiem,” “Past,” “Woody” A lot of people breathed a huge sigh of relief when a Mississippi federal judge dismissed (at the pleadings stage) claims for copyright infringement...
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Whoops Did You Just Give Away Your Copyright?
Common-Sense Decision Is a Trap for the Unwary (and Everyone Else) A surprisingly fertile field for litigation are “multiple listing services” (MLS) and related real-estate websites. Here’s an MLS for...
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Owner Liable for his Company’s Copyright Infringement
Incorporation? Shmincorporation! Since Aaron & Sanders is in the business of (among other things) helping start-ups get started up, one of the most frequent questions Tara and I get is whether it...
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Let’s Sue Everyone! More on the Personal Liability of Business Owners for...
Lawyers Sue Too Much, Except When They Don’t Last week, I discussed the scary court decision, Universal Furniture Int’l, Inc. v. Frankel, in which the owners of a company were found liable for their...
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Eastern District Tennessee Severs BitTorrent Lawsuit
BitTorrent Swarm ≠ “Transaction or Occurrence” I used to blog about BitTorrent lawsuits quite a bit, but dropped that in favor of folks who blogged about them much more comprehensively. But there was...
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Who Owns the Goldmine? Bob Marley’s Missing Copyright
The Mysteries of Copyright Ownership If there were a goldmine in your town—one that produced a worthwhile amount of gold every year and wouldn’t run out for many, many years—you’d probably expect any...
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I Need a Copyright License for My Personal Virtual Island?
Yes, if You Hired Someone to Design it for You. Remember when Second Life was all the rage? I’ll admit that my memory is a little hazy, but I swear it was a huge deal a few years ago. Anyway, it’s...
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Hotfile on the Internet- What You Don’t Know Can Hurt Your DMCA Safe Harbor
On the Importance of Knowing Just Enough As we all know by now (quick primer here), the DMCA safe harbor is a marvelous, marvelous thing for internet-related system operators—not just YouTube, but any...
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The Vimeo Case and the DMCA: What Your Employees Know Can Hurt You
Oh, Those Pesky, Pesky Employees! From a legal* point of view, hardly anything good ever comes out of the employer-employee relationship**, when you think about it. Wrongful termination suits, reams of...
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Willfully to Power in Criminal Copyright Law
Ninth Circuit Clarifies that “Willfully” Means “Willfully” I think most people know that there is such a thing as criminal copyright infringement, i.e., copyright infringement so heinous that the U.S....
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Funny Just Isn’t Enough – What’s “Parody” in Copyright
People can be terribly clever sometimes. Take the Holderness Family, for example. Apparently, mom was too busy running triathlons to sit down and write out a family newsletter, so the family made up...
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Is it Fair Use? Information Wants to Be Free, but Copyright Is at the Turnpike
We Took the Whole Thing, But it Was for Journalism!I blogged about Swatch’s dispute with Bloomberg a couple of years ago. At the time, Bloomberg’s motion to dismiss had just been denied, but the trial...
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The Color Run and a Photographer Engage in a Reverse Mexican...
Part 1 of 2: These Colors Run (Maybe Too Fast) to the CourthouseYou may have heard the one about the quasi-charitable fun run and how it stole photographs from a freelance photograph and then sued...
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The Color Run v Photographer Part 2: The Joys of Copyright Registration and...
Part 2 of 3: The Photographer’s CaseLast time, I discussed how The Color Run, a party with (as we’ll see) fairly sophisticated IP counsel, got into such a pretty bad, but avoidable, public-relations...
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The Color Run v Photographer Part 3—Failing at Risk-Reward Analysis
Part 3 of 3: When Doing Nothing Is the Best ChoiceThis is the last in a series of posts about how the popular quasi-charitable event organizer, The Color Run, got into such a serious scrape with a...
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Through Thick and Thin: Range of Expression as Basic Principle of Substantial...
Songwriters: The Ninth Circuit Might Actually Have Heard You When the Blurred Lines verdict was reached—and again when it was upheld, twice—there were many stories about how the decision cast a pall on...
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The Case of the Haunted House Logo Nightmare
Joint Operation of a Business Leads to a Nightmare of a Case It’s fun to blog about well-publicized cases, like the recent Stairway to Heaven decision. But I pay much more attention to quotidian IP...
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The U.S. Copyright Office’s DMCA Section 512 Study Erases a Major Stakeholder
The U.S. Copyright Office’s Section 512 Report Is “Unbalanced” After five years of work, the U.S. Copyright Office has issued its lengthy report about how the DMCA safe harbors are working. If you want...
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Dumb Mistake in Copyright Registration Leads to Brutal and Unjust Consequences
When American Exceptionalism Isn’t Exceptional Americans assume copyright is something you have to register for. The rest of the world assumes either registration is voluntary or honestly doesn’t know...
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How Much Mischief Can Copyright Registrations Cause?
What Happens if Reasonable Minds Could Disagree Whether Information in a Copyright Registration Is “Inaccurate”? Last time, I wrote about an outrageous legal result, Unicolors v. H & M. Because the...
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