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)….
Artists’ Rights and Theft Prevention Act–New Criminal Copyright Infringement Standards
As part of the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, Congress enacted the “Artists’ Rights and Theft Prevention Act of 2005” or the “ART Act.” The ART Act adds two new major criminal standards: (1) using a camcorder to record a…
NPR on Whois and Privacy
Larry Abramson of NPR ran a story entitled “New Laws on Domain Names Aim to Stem Online Fraud” (specifically referring to the Fraudulent Online Identity Sanctions Act, passed as part of the Intellectual Property Protection in Courts Administration Act). My…
Grokster Oral Arguments
If you haven’t seen it elsewhere, the transcript from the oral arguments in Grokster.