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Technology & Marketing Law Blog
Tyler Ochoa
April 13, 2020

On March 23, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously held in Allen v. Cooper,  No. 18-877, that states have sovereign immunity from claims of copyright infringement, and that 17 U.S.C. § 511, which purports to waive that immunity, is unconstitutional.The result was not unexpected, but the unanimity was.  I previously wrote about the case at the time certiorari was granted.  In that post I wrote: “If the Justices vote along conventional political lines, one can predict a 5-4 decision affirming the Fourth Circuit at the Supreme Court level, following the opinions in Seminole Tribe and Florida Prepaid and holding that § 511 was not a valid waiver of sovereign immunity under § 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment.”  Instead, the Court reached unanimity by relying on stare decisis.

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The content in this post was found at https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2020/04/u-s-supreme-court-confirms-that-states-have-sovereign-immunity-from-copyright-infringement-suits-allen-v-cooper.htm Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post. and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law

Guest post by Gilad Yadin

april 9, 2018

When I began studying the legal implications of virtual reality technology, seeing or using an actual virtual reality system required access to a research laboratory or a specialized training facility; virtual reality was something most people associated with science fiction, it seemed futuristic and far-fetched. A few years ago, Facebook got very publicly into virtual reality and suddenly everyone was talking about affordable, connected, social virtual reality environments. These days, roughly $400 worth of virtual reality hardware allows anyone to interact with social contacts, through expressive avatars, in a three-dimensional spatial environment. The surging virtual reality market is estimated to reach $40 billion by 2020. Cyberspace is changing in ways that can no longer be ignored.

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Law journal article: http://www.jetlaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/5_Yadin-Article_Final.pdf

IP Watchdog

Steve Brachmann
March 21, 2018

Although it’s not illegal to earn a profit, unfair business practices in the pursuit of holding a monopoly over an entire industry led to the breakup of Standard Oil, especially the rebates from railroad companies for oil shipments which substantially lowered Standard Oil’s transportation costs relative to its much smaller competitors. Recent academic research has suggested that, while the U.S. government acted appropriately to stop the cartelization of an industry, Standard Oil was engaging in typical capitalist activity in securing better deals which optimized oil shipments.

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The content in this post was found at https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/03/21/tech-giants-maintain-dominance-copying-technologies/id=94596/

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The content in this post was found at https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/03/congress-oks-sex-trafficking-bill-that-critics-say-will-censor-the-internet/

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Eric Goldman
Technology and Marketing Law Blog

March 13, 2018

[It’s a sign of my busy 2018 that I’m only now posting my annual Internet Law year-in-review recap. Better late than never?]

Can the Print-on-Demand Industry Survive?

Trump and Twitter.

Uber.

Europe’s GDPR.

Net Neutrality.

Section 230 and Sex Trafficking.

SESTA/FOSTA

“Conservatives” Bring Censorious Civil Rights Lawsuits Against Internet Giants (and “Liberal” Google/Facebook/Twitter Haters Cheer Them On).

Internet Companies Are Viewed as the Problem, Not the Solution (Especially for Political Ads).

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The content in this post was found at https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2018/03/top-internet-law-developments-of-2017-very-late.htm 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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Amanda G. Ciccatelli
February 26, 2018

IP Watchdog

How big of a role does IP play in Silicon Valley deals? “In almost any size transaction involving a technology company, our client asks us to look carefully at the company’s IP and the agreements the company has entered into with third parties to secure rights in IP and to permit others to use that IP,” said John Brockland, a technology and IP transactions partner at Hogan Lovells. “Depending on how a transaction is structured, the terms on which IP is assigned or licensed between the parties in a deal can also be a critical area of focus for our client.”

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The content in this post was found at https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/02/26/intellectual-property-plays-big-role-silicon-valley-deals/id=94010/ 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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For the past year, I’ve been covering Congress’ efforts to create a sex trafficking exception to Section 230’s immunity. From the beginning, it was clear that the proponents did not understand Section 230’s powerful but counter-intuitive doctrinal mechanisms, yet their initiative to gut Section 230 had momentum. Two bills were introduced: SESTA in the Senate and FOSTA in the House. Both bills as introduced were terrible.

After a Senate Commerce Committee hearing, SESTA was amended to fix some of its roughest edges, but the amendments didn’t resolve SESTA’s structural flaw (I’ll discuss that below). As part of a House Judiciary Committee hearing, FOSTA as introduced was replaced by substitute FOSTA, which still had problems but represented a more productive approach to address sex trafficking. Amended SESTA and substitute FOSTA passed the Senate Commerce Committee and House Judiciary Committee, respectively, queuing both up for passage by their respective chambers. However, amended SESTA has been slowed by Sen. Wyden’s hold; and for reasons that aren’t clear to me, the House Judiciary Committee didn’t report substitute FOSTA until last week. Ten days ago, the House Energy & Commerce Committee waived jurisdiction over FOSTA to help get the bill on the House floor.

Ever since substitute FOSTA emerged, one of the key questions has been how Senate and House might reconcile the different policy approaches in SESTA and FOSTA if both advanced. No one I spoke to, not even the inside-Congress experts, were confident in their predictions. Last week, a backroom deal was announced that apparently answers that question, but in substantively and procedurally deficient ways. This is BAD NEWS.

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The content in this post was found at https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2018/02/congress-probably-will-ruin-section-230-this-week-sestafosta-updates.htm

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Tech dirt
[retrieved 2-27-18]

A week or so back, we discussed the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE) calling on the Copyright Office to extend exemptions to anti-circumvention in the DMCA to organizations looking to curate and preserve online games. Any reading of stories covering this idea needs to be grounded in the understanding that the Librarian of Congress has already extended these same exemptions to video games that are not online multiplayer games. Games of this sort are art, after all, and exemptions to the anti-circumvention laws allow museums, libraries, and others to preserve and display older games that may not natively run on current technology, or those that have been largely lost in terms of physical product. MADE’s argument is that online multiplayer games are every bit the art that these single-player games are and deserve preservation as well.

Well, the Entertainment Software Association, an industry group that largely stumps for the largest gaming studios and publishers in the industry, has come out in opposition to preserving online games, arguing that such preservation is a threat to the industry.

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The content in this post was found at https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180219/10404139267/esa-comes-out-against-allowing-museums-to-curate-online-video-games-posterity.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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