Revenge of the MPAA — First Test for the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act?
(Eric Goldman is travelling and lecturing until June 13, and will be able to post only occasionally during this time. In his absence, John Ottaviani will continue to guest-blog from time to time.) The media has been reporting the availability…
New Ruling From Judge Patel in Napster Investor Suit
By John Ottaviani There’s been some discussion and misconceptions about Judge Patel’s latest ruling in the long-running Napster saga. Although her May 11 order has been described as holding that the Section 106(3) distribution right does not extend to maintaining…
Racine Man Plans to Fight RIAA
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports on Dave Bink, a Racine dad who was sued by the RIAA because of KaZaA downloads made by his 13 year old daughter. He has decided to fight the lawsuit in court because (a) his daughter…
Orphan Works Comments, Round 2
After the first 716 comments on orphan works, you’d think the Copyright Office would have had enough. Instead, they allowed the filing of “responses” to the initial 716 comment salvo and got another 145 comments. Whew! That’s a lot of…
Copyright Office RSS Feeds
The Copyright Office has launched four RSS feeds. I’ve been an email subscriber of NewsNet for a while, but I think the other feeds provide us with new ways to monitor the Copyright Office’s activities. Kudos to the Copyright Office…
Marquette Joins BSA’s DefineTheLine.com Initiative
Marquette’s Announcement Marquette sent out the following announcement yesterday: “Marquette is participating in the launch of “Define the Line,” a national program aimed at discouraging illegal sharing and downloading of software. The program calls upon students, faculty and staff to…
Is Camcordering Ever Legitimate?
I exchanged emails with Ed Foster regarding the anti-camcordering portion of the ART Act. Ed expressed concerns about the proportionality of criminalizing camcordering, and he has a point. Merely recording a movie is not, by itself, harmful. At worst, camcordering…
Bush Signs Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005
Not surprisingly, Pres. Bush signed the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005 into law today. My critiques on film skipping and new criminal sanctions. UPDATE: Fred von Lohmann offers his characteristically clear-headed perspective on the Family Entertainment and Copyright…
Walmart Foundation Uses Copyright to Curtail Griper
The Walmart Foundation has gone after the gripe site “walmart-foundation.org” using 512(c)(3) notices to take down images that the griper took from walmartfoundation.org. A few observations about this: * copyright is an extremely effective tool against gripers. Using a 512(c)(3)…
Family Movie Act of 2005—Legalizing Technology to Skip Film Parts
This morning I blogged on the criminal law part of the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act. Now, I’ll discuss the Family Movie Act of 2005, which allows technology to make parts of a film imperceptible (let’s call it film skipping)….