From this summer: Playwright Matthew Lombardo’s comedy “Who’s Holiday!,” a raunchy tale set in the world of the Grinch years after the original story, wins a Second Circuit ruling as protected parody against the copyright claims of the Dr. Seuss estate [Greg Evans, Deadline Hollywood]
Posts Tagged ‘copyright’
Judge Lamberth blasts copyright lawsuit mill
“A federal judge in Washington brought the hammer down on uber-litigious Fox Rothschild client Strike 3 Holdings, calling it a copyright troll that ‘treats this court not as a citadel of justice, but as an ATM.’… ‘Armed with hundreds of cut-and-pasted complaints and boilerplate discovery motions, Strike 3 floods this courthouse (and others around the country) with lawsuits smacking of extortion. It treats this Court not as a citadel of justice, but as an ATM.” Lamberth goes on to say his court declines “to oversee a high-tech shakedown,” and adds much colorful detail about the plaintiffs’ methods. Los Angeles-based Fox Rothschild partner Lincoln Bandlow, who is said to coordinate the Strike 3 Holdings campaign, said that an appeals court would “correct this anomalous decision.” [Roy Strom, American Lawyer] Earlier on the Prenda Law saga.
November 28 roundup
- Georgia woman jailed for three months after field drug test misidentifies contents of plastic bag in her car, which she had told disbelieving officers contained blue cotton candy [WMAZ] Related: Georgia “Drug Recognition Expert” officers sometimes arrest drivers who are sober [Brendan Keefe and Michael King, WMAZ in January]
- “What I call the four forces of the regulatory state — regulation by administration, prosecution, and litigation; and progressive anti-federalism—operate mostly independently of Congress, notwithstanding the legislative branch’s constitutional power to ‘regulate Commerce … among the several States.'” [Jim Copland, City Journal]
- Rights of associational privacy: Bradley Smith of the Institute for Free Speech comments on the ongoing relevance on the 60th anniversary of NAACP v. Alabama [Cato Daily Podcast with Brad Smith and Caleb Brown]
- “If you’ve flown on a major airline within the past 7 years, you might be cashing in” although the settlement website admits it’s “possible that ticket buyers will never get any money from the lawsuit” owing to fees and expenses [KMBC]
- To argue for freedom, sometimes it makes sense to argue for things other than freedom [Jonathan Rauch on same-sex marriage and medical marijuana controversies, quotes me; David Henderson/EconLib]
- “The Eleventh Circuit takes a tour through the history of copyright and the nature of authorship in exploring whether the state of Georgia can assert copyright in its annotated state laws and thereby prevent a nonprofit from making them available for free online. (It can’t.)” [John Kenneth Ross, IJ “Short Circuit,” on Code Revision Commission v. Public.Resource.Org]
Copyright music takedowns
“Sony Music Entertainment has been forced to abandon its claim that it owned 47 seconds of video of musician James Rhodes using his own piano to play music written by Johann Sebastian Bach.” After Rhodes posted the video to Facebook, Sony sent a takedown notice saying that the performance “matches 47 seconds of audio” owned by Sony. Match-detecting algorithms have become commonplace in the copyright takedown field; in this case, Sony backed down after Rhodes’s tweet about the situation got considerable attention. [Timothy Lee, ArsTechnica]
Sony does own the rights to the performances of important Bach interpreters such as Glenn Gould, so it is possible that a performance influenced by Gould’s would be especially likely to trip a similarity algorithm. But it gets worse. Last year an Australian music teacher named Sebastian Tomczak “posted on YouTube a 10-hour recording of white noise as an experiment” (in sound perception, not copyright practice) and “within days, the upload had five different copyright claims filed against it. All five would allow continued use of the material, the notices explained, if Tomczak allowed the upload to be “monetized,” meaning accompanied by advertisements from which the claimants would get a share.” [Joseph Bottum, Free Beacon]
And finally, from my own recent experience: a comment from a local performance group’s Facebook page about how a recording of a sing-through of Gilbert & Sullivan Utopia, Ltd. triggered a takedown based on supposed copying of an entirely different work, Rossini’s William Tell. The passage that showed too much similarity? The audience applause!
October 10 roundup
- “Heisman Trophy People Sue HeismanWatch For Using Images Of The Trophy And Stating Its Name” [Timothy Geigner, TechDirt]
- At elite law schools, the days when a centrist liberal like Elena Kagan could offer a welcome to Federalist Society types are fast drawing to a close, writes Reihan Salam [The Atlantic]
- Being able to link to federal court cases and legal materials would be huge: legislation from Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.) “would require that the courts make PACER documents available for download free of charge” [Timothy Lee, ArsTechnica]
- “UPDATE: Judge Rules Province Has No Duty to Recognize Bigfoot” [Kevin Underhill, Lowering the Bar, earlier]
- First state with such a law: “California governor signs bill banning sale of animal-tested cosmetics” [John Bowden, The Hill]
- North Carolina bar says lawyer “defrauded, deceived and embezzled funds from two mentally disabled clients who were declared innocent after spending 31 years in prison” [Joseph Neff, Marshall Project]
“Senate passes copyright bill to end 140-year protection for old songs”
The Senate has now unanimously passed its own version of the Music Modernization Act, a bill intended to enable clearinghouse payment by those streaming, performing, or otherwise using older musical works. Under a House-passed bill more favorable toward owners of very old material, “a song recorded in 1927 would effectively get 140 years of protection, vastly longer than the 95 years current law gives to books, movies, and other works published around the same time.” [Timothy Lee, ArsTechnica]
Creator royalties on art in public spaces
Creators of art displayed in parks and other public spaces have been using assertions of copyright to demand cash from, or play favorites among, private persons and groups seeking to carry on video or photography in those spaces. Aaron Renn: “Any city installing public art should ensure that the agreement with the artist provides for unconditional royalty free pictures and videos, or the art shouldn’t be installed.”
“‘Dancing Baby’ lawsuit finally settles, baby is now a middle-school student”
“Universal Music Publishing Group has finally settled its copyright lawsuit involving Stephanie Lenz, the woman who posted a short video of her son dancing to a Prince song in 2007.” [Cyrus Farivar, ArsTechnica, earlier]
Free speech roundup
- Video now online of Nadine Strossen at Cato speaking on her new book Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship. And John Samples kicks off series of blog posts about book [first, second]
- Press vs. President: “the more tightly regulated media landscape of the early 1970s” played directly into Nixon’s hands [Matt Welch]
- Romance writer’s bid to stop authors from using word ‘cocky’ fails in court [Alison Flood/Guardian, earlier]
- “New law forces Google to suspend political ads in Washington state” [Timothy Lee, ArsTechnica]
- “The Minnesota criminal harassment statute is equally dubious, applying when a person sends two or more tweets ‘with the intent to abuse, disturb, or cause distress.’ Really…?” [Venkat Balasubramani, Technology and Marketing Law Blog] “Crime in D.C. to Negligently Cause ‘Significant Mental Suffering’ by Saying Two Non-Political Things About Someone” [Eugene Volokh] “NY State Legislators Unanimously Pass A Cyberbullying Bill That Can’t Be Bothered To Define Cyberbullying” [Tim Cushing, TechDirt; Eric Turkowitz]
- Blame failings of copyright law, not scholarly neglect, for long inattention to Zora Neale Hurston manuscript [Ted Genoways, Washington Post/Valley News]
HBO sued over three-second shot of graffiti
HBO has prevailed in a copyright and trademark lawsuit brought by the creator of a piece of graffiti on a dumpster that was briefly glimpsed (for two or three seconds) in a show. [Timothy Geigner, Techdirt]