How to respond to the emergence of assembly-line copyright-suit filers without undermining the right of content owners to stop unauthorized reprints that go beyond fair use? Max Kennerly raises the possibility of steering rights owners into agency complaints or arbitration as an alternative, or at least precondition, to court action. That might slow down the business model of groups like RightHaven, which has demanded in terrorem sums from mom-and-pop bloggers and other infringers and even asked courts to order seizure of the domains of otherwise legitimate target websites.
Posts Tagged ‘copyright’
July 26 roundup
- Emerging newspaper business model: copyright lawsuits against bloggers? [Kravets, Wired, Ron Coleman, TechDirt, PoL]
- Five NYC hospitals to use “health courts” to seek agreements before medical malpractice cases go to trial [WSJ]
- Serpentine asbestos politics behind “California state rock” fracas [Cal Civil Justice, more, PoL, Bailey, earlier here and here]
- From Andrew Grossman: “Feinberg: ‘priests, mayors or even sheriffs could vouch for [BP trust fund] claims of local businesses.’ Has he ever been to Miss, La.?!”
- Va. lawyer, real estate agent sanctioned for “frivolous claims supported by wild speculation” [ABA Journal]
- An injury lawyer reads and reacts to my first book, The Litigation Explosion [Alan Crede]
- Le Corbusier’s writing made him sound like certain pro se litigants [Johnson, PrawfsBlawg]
- “Tip: Photoshopping Self Into Charity Photos Not Likely to Reduce Sentence” [Lowering the Bar, more]
July 14 roundup
- “Sources: Trial lawyers expect tax break from Treasury Department” [Legal NewsLine, PoL, earlier; measure would reportedly replicate contents of bill that didn’t pass Congress]
- No doubt totally unrelated: eight Dem Senate candidates journey to Vancouver for AAJ fundraiser [The Hill, David Freddoso, ShopFloor, more]
- Report: elderly man jailed after making “bomb” joke about carry-on at airport [NBCNewYork]
- New York debt collection law firm files 80,000 actions a year, critics say errors and lack of documentation inevitable [NYT]
- Kimberly-Clark: quit letting asbestos plaintiffs forum-shop against us [SE Texas Record] How a new asbestos defendant can get “passed around” among claimants [Global Tort, scroll] Prosperity of one Cleveland asbestos law firm I’d never heard of [Briefcase]
- North Carolina court of appeals: employee rushing to bathroom after getting off work not acting within scope of employment [Matthews v. Food Lion, PDF]
- “Curse of the greedy copyright holders” [Woodlief, WSJ, via de Rugy, NRO; TechDirt]
- Update: “Ninth Circuit suspends Walter Lack, reprimands Thomas Girardi” [famed California lawyers tripped up in Dole suit; Legal Ethics Forum, PoL, earlier]
June 18 roundup
- “When the country went cold turkey”: Tyler Cowen reviews Last Call, Daniel Okrent’s history of Prohibition [Business Week]
- Phrases never to put in email, e.g., “We Probably Shouldn’t Put This in Email” [Balasubramani, SpamNotes]
- “My biggest wish was that I would get a cease and desist from the company that publishes Marmaduke” [Walker, Reason “Hit and Run”]
- California proposal to jail parents for kids’ truancy [Valerie Strauss/WaPo via Alkon] Parents arrested on charges of forging doctor sick note to excuse third grader [Glenn Reynolds, Dan Riehl]
- UK judge: NHS need not fund transsexual’s breast enlargement [Mail]
- “Charitable Foundation Leader Alarmed by Government Intrusions into Philanthropy” [WLF Legal Pulse]
- Missed earlier: “Stalking Victims’ Duty to Warn Employees, Lovers, Visitors, and Others?” [Volokh]
- “Overturning Iqbal and Twombly Would Encourage Frivolous Litigation” [Darpana Sheth, Insider Online]
June 14 roundup
- Study: Lawyers overestimate their chance of prevailing in litigation [Post, Volokh]
- Novell court victory might spell end to SCO Linux-infringement claims [GrokLaw, earlier]
- “Law firms violating copyrights?” [Mister Thorne]
- Lawyers say New Jersey money-laundering statute “uniquely criminalizes the mere possession of U.S. currency” [NJLJ]
- Ted Frank vs. critic on $28 million Sacramento nursing home award [PoL]
- Advocates push “right to development” for developing countries [Kelly, Global Governance Watch]
- For once Connecticut AG Blumenthal wants a damage award reduced [Hartford Courant, earlier at PoL]
- “Did You Know That the Real World Has an STD Waiver?” [Mystal, AtL]
The high (copyright) cost of “Glee”
How do you know the popular TV show is fiction? Because if a real-life high school glee club in Lima, Ohio were actually basing its performances on contemporary material without employing a small army of rights-clearers and paying heftily in royalties, it could face copyright damage demands approaching a million dollars:
Defenders of modern copyright law will argue Congress has struck “the right balance” between copyright holders’ interests and the public good. They’ll suggest the current law is an appropriate compromise among interest groups. But by claiming the law strikes “the right balance,” what they’re really saying is that the Glee kids deserve to be on the losing side of a lawsuit. Does that sound like the right balance to you?
[Christina Mulligan, Yale Law School Information Society Project via Katherine Mangu-Ward, Reason] More: Legal Blog Watch, A Foolish Consistency.
“Everyone on TV reads the same newspaper”
Do studio lawyers think it’s too dangerous to use real newspapers because they haven’t been rights-cleared? [Doctorow, BoingBoing]
May 3 roundup
- Lawmakers in Georgia vote for bill to forbid forced micro-chipping after listening respectfully to “this happened to me” story [Popehat]
- “Why does the Wall Street regulation overhaul give FTC authority over the Internet?” [Morrissey and WaPo via Gillespie]
- “Woman alleges termination due to gender, not sleeping on the job” [SE Texas Record]
- Writers’ Union of Canada surprisingly unfriendly toward writers’ freedom regarding fair use/fair dealing [BoingBoing]
- Despite purported bar on strategic use, Senate bill to stay deportation of illegal aliens while workplace claims are pending would create incentive to come up with such claims [Fox, Employer’s Lawyer]
- “California Magistrate Scoffs at Plaintiff’s MySpace Page, But Awards Damages Anyway” [Abnormal Use]
- State of free speech in Britain: police confront man over political sign in window of his home, arrest preacher over anti-gay remarks [Mail and more, Telegraph via Steyn, related from Andrew Sullivan and MWW]
- “Should Tort Law Be Tougher on Lawyers?” [Alex Long, TortsProf]
April 2 roundup
- What? You mean it wasn’t real?
- Nothing special at Lowering the Bar for April Fool’s Day since the site’s regular fare was unbelievable enough;
- “Steve Cohen’s Wife Was So Excited To Sue Him, She ‘Could Hardly Contain Herself'” [Business Insider]
- John Stossel, quoting Cato’s Jerry Taylor, on energy independence and wishful science;
- Senior Church of England bishop warns of “victim culture” and “blame society” [Telegraph via Alkon]
- Landlord didn’t care for tenant’s display: “Peeps Eviction Trial Postponed” [Lowering the Bar, Legal Blog Watch]
- Great mileage, clean reputation, too bad the EPA’s holding up their importation [Coyote]
- YouTube, copyright infringement, and the Viacom lawsuit [Manjoo, Slate]
Appalling ACTA: a treaty worth stopping
David Post at Volokh Conspiracy sounds the alarm over the many bad provisions in a new intellectual property pact, the “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement,” arrived at through a “truly outrageous bit of executive branch over-reaching on Hollywood’s behalf.” Margot Kaminski at Balkinization details how the measure if adopted would for the first time criminalize a wide swath of noncommercial personal copying behavior, mandate statutory damages that would grossly over-compensate many rights holders for infringements, and reduce de minimis thresholds under which border officers currently overlook small quantities of infringing material on travelers’ laptops and smartphones. And those are just a few highlights of a long and disturbing list of provisions. Earlier here.
P.S. Much more from Andrew Moshirnia at Citizen Media Law. And at the Mercatus Center’s Surprisingly Free, a podcast with Canadian ACTA critic Michael Geist.