Sam Bayard of the CMLP has a thoughtful post on the MediaDefender controversy, the Diebold matter of a few years ago, chilling effects (the project and the concept, both), and the DMCA. Sam’s post is good lawyering, in its way. It made me think about how, in the copyright field, the usual arguments sometimes get … Read more
The Harvard Cooperative Society — also known as our campus bookseller (also a Barnes & Noble) — has been claiming that it has an “intellectual property” right in the ISBN numbers and/or prices of the textbooks that we as faculty assign to our students. We’ve got an op-ed in The Crimson this morning disputing their … Read more
Despite the growth of blogging and RSS, confusion persists regarding the reuse of user-generated content. While fair use, Creative Commons licenses, and social norms provide some guidance, there remains a gap in clarity for the paid reuse of such content. Additional insights can be found in linked previous posts.
Three recent conversations I’ve been part of offered a contrast in styles and views on intellectual property rights across the Atlantic. First, the Fordham International IP conference, which Prof. Hugh Hanson puts on each year (in New York, NY, USA); the terrific classes in Law and Economics of Intellectual Property that Prof. Urs Gasser teaches … Read more
Prof. Wendy Seltzer, one of the original Berkman team and still a fellow, is our honored guest at lunch today. She’s telling the story of her back-and-forth with the NFL over the 30-second clip she posted to YouTube, as chronicled in the Wall Street Journal’s law blog, her own blog, and elsewhere. Wendy’s claim is … Read more
I’ve been e-mailing with Michael Fricklas of Viacom since I posted about Jim Moore’s home video that got caught in Viacom’s 100,000 take-down push on Friday. Mr. Fricklas wrote to me a few times during their process of assessing how many errors they made out of 100,000. Today, he wrote: “… we’re achieving an error … Read more
As with Jim Moore’s video — now famous thanks to Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing — you can decide for yourself whether Viacom’s cease-and-desist letter should have resulted in Jaegercat’s video being taken down at YouTube. In an e-mail from .sg, (which she said I could republish), Jaegercat writes: “My video ‘Beat Police’, an original … Read more
Google News suggests that there have been about 500 stories so far written in this news sources that they scan on the topic of Viacom’s 100,000 take-down notices to YouTube users. Most of the stories focus on the business dynamics of the matter, understandably: 1) why Viacom did this; 2) the possibility (or likelihood, or … Read more
The chief copyright, trademark and trade secret lawyer for Microsoft, Tom Rubin, has been a consistent contributor to our teaching program at the Berkman Center for the past three years. He’s been enormously generous with his time, meeting with Berkman-related students, faculty and fellows over several years. We’ve learned a great deal from Tom and … Read more
The Berkman communications team has been conducting a series of interviews with our fellows. The interviews are written up and posted to the Berkman website. The most recent interview is with Prof. Dr. Urs Gasser, a faculty fellow and the director of a research center at the University of St. Gallen. His center — along … Read more