Free for a Fee

John Cannan
IP Watchdog
June 8, 2019

The Eighties are in! A contagious wave of nostalgia has infected popular culture with period TV series, from shows like Stranger Things to rebirths and reboots of the era’s shows and movies. This retro cultural appropriation was bound to involve a copyright issue. Indeed, a dispute arose over a documentary on the 1985 Chicago Bears, which made an unauthorized use of the team’s landmark music video, The Superbowl Shuffle. The Shuffle’s owners claimed an infringement on the licensing market for the work. The documentarians claimed fair use. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, ruled for the documentarians, granting them summary judgment, in Red Label Music Publishing v. Chila Productions.

The content in this post was found at https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2019/06/08/not-start-trouble-court-rules-documentarys-use-super-bowl-shuffle-fair-use/id=110213/ Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post. and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com

Valerie Brennan & Gabriel Guerra Medellin
LexBlog
June 10, 2019
The many historic landmarks and neighborhoods in Washington DC are one of the draws for locating events there. In a cautionary tale for event organizers, however, the Court of Appeals of the Fourth District recently ruled that unauthorized use of a third party photograph of the Adams Morgan neighborhood did not qualify as fair use, reversing and remanding the District Court’s summary judgment order.

Mike Masnick
Tech Dirt
June 12, 2019

Almost exactly three years ago we wrote about how well known computer security professor Matthew Green and famed hardware hacker Bunnie Huang had teamed up with EFF and the law firm Wilson Sonsini to file a fascinating 1st Amendment challenge to the DMCA’s Section 1201. 1201 is the so-called “anti-circumvention” or digital locks provision of the DMCA, that says that it’s infringing to “manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof” that is designed to “circumvent” DRM or other “technological protection measures.” Basically, if there’s a digital lock on something — doing anything to get around it (or to help others get around it) is potentially a copyright violation even if (and this is important) the purpose and result of circumventing the DRM has nothing to do with infringing on copyright.

Even Congress knew that this part of the law was crazy when they passed it. It knew that this would lead to all sorts of perfectly reasonable activities suddenly being declared infringing — so it came up with a really annoying hack to deal with that. A triennial review, where every three years everyone could go beg the Copyright Office and the Librarian of Congress to grant categories of exemptions from Section 1201. Those exemptions only last for three years, so even if you get one, you need to keep applying.

The lawsuit took an interesting approach to challenging 1201. Noting that the Supreme Court has long held that fair use is a necessary safety valve to make copyright compatible with the 1st Amendment, they noted that 1201 does not allow fair use as a defense. And if it’s true that fair use is necessary to make copyright compliant with the 1st Amendment, then that should mean that 1201 is not constitutional.

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The content in this post was found at https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190710/23312242561/three-years-later-1st-amendment-challenge-over-dmcas-anti-circumvention-provisions-can-move-forward.shtml Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post. and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com

Rashanda Bruce
LexBlog
December 21, 2018

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals returned a favorable ruling for major record companies in a copyright infringement case on December 12, 2018.  The ruling came down in Capitol Records, LLC v. ReDigi Inc., a lawsuit involving an online platform (“ReDigi”) designed to enable the lawful resale of purchased digital music files.  The Second Circuit concluded that ReDigi infringed the record companies’ exclusive rights under Section 106 of the Copyright Act.

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The content in this post was found at https://www.lexblog.com/2018/12/21/buyer-keeper-forever-second-circuit-affirms-decision-music-files-purchased-online-cannot-resold-online/ Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post. and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com

Neal Klausner of Davis & Gilbert LLP, Howard Weingrad of Davis & Gilbert LLP & Claudia G. Cohen of Davis & Gilbert LLP
LexBlog
December 5, 2018

A recent decision from a Pennsylvania federal court underscores that there is generally no copyright protection in an actual building or a skyline of buildings; instead, the protection is in the particular photograph or rendering of the building.

Creating an original depiction of a building or skyline that is not substantially similar to the photograph or rendering may provide protection from liability for copyright infringement. Other federal courts, however, have held that actual use of a pre-existing photograph of a skyline of buildings, or a portion of such a photograph, without the copyright owner’s authorization, may constitute copyright infringement.

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The content in this post was found at https://www.lexblog.com/2018/12/05/when-does-copying-a-photograph-of-a-building-constitute-copyright-infringement Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post. and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com

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Eric Goldman
Technology & Marketing Law Blog
November 29, 2018

For the past couple of years, I have invested significantly in all things emojis. This post rounds up everything I’ve done during that period.

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The content in this post was found at https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2018/11/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-emojis-and-the-law.htm Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post. and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com

Timothy Geigner
Tech Dirt
Oct 16th 2018

A case in point of this would be Canadian artist Adam Basanta, who has come up with a bonkers and very cool method for both producing machine-generated art and then validating that art for human consumption by comparing it to real-world artwork made by us lowly apes. Let’s start with his setup.

Broadly, Basanta’s machine has two stages: creation and validation.

Creation happens with a hardware setup that Basanta likens to a Rube Goldberg machine: two computer scanners tipped on their sides and pointed face to face, endlessly scanning each other, and the results – influenced by shifts in the room’s lighting, randomized settings and an automatically moving mouse – are interpreted by a computer and turned into colourful abstract pictures.

The second stage is validation. Another computer running a custom-built program automatically checks each image against an online database of real art made by human hands. If the machine-made image is similar to one that has been human-made, the computer dubs it a success and keeps it; if there is no match, the image is deleted forever.

If that doesn’t get your heart beating a little faster, you simply don’t care about art. This setup is, at the very least, incredibly interesting, and Basanta’s method for validating whether the art produced by the machines is good enough for human consumption or not kicks the interest level into overdrive. His setup generates something like a thousand images a day, with a tiny fraction of that being deemed worthy of retention. The whole thing was good enough to warrant an art exhibit in Canada and Basanta has featured many of the images on his website as well.

And that’s where the trouble started. Artist Amel Chamandy has alleged that Basanta violated her copyright on a piece she created called “A World Without Trees”, as well as the trademark rights she has on her own name. Both claims stem from one of the pieces Basanta’s machine setup used to validate its own artwork against and the naming convention it used to denote the new pieces it created.

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The content in this post was found at https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20181005/09595440788/art-ai-infringement-copyright-conundrum.shtml Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post. and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com

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Mike Masnick
Tech Dirt
June 26, 2019

Last fall we were happy to see the 11th Circuit rule that, obviously, a state’s official laws couldn’t be covered by copyright . . .

the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case.

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The content in this post was found at https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190624/10311942465/supreme-court-to-review-whether-not-you-can-copyright-state-laws.shtml Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post. and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com

Mike Masnick
Tech Dirt
Wed, Feb 6th 2019

If you’ve been following copyright issues for more than a few years, you surely remember Aereo, a company that attempted to set up a bunch of micro-TV antennas which it could then use to stream broadcast TV to paying subscribers. . . .

And then, even more bizarre, the Supreme Court ruled against Aereo using no actually defined standard, but basically just saying that it looked too much like a cable service, so they’ll call it a cable service (something I’ve referred to as the Supreme Court’s “looks like a duck” doctrine). . . .

However, it appears that at least one operation is trying again with an Aereo-like approach. And once again, it’s taken a very legally-focused approach. Perhaps that’s because it’s been set up by a lawyer, David Goodfriend, who formerly worked for the FCC (and in the media industry). The NY Times has a big article about his Locast operation, and how he’s hoping to get sued to prove that his approach is legal, where Aereo’s failed.

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The content in this post was found at https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190204/10274241525/former-fcc-official-attempts-to-create-aereo-that-supreme-court-wont-kill.shtml Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post. and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com