Any veteran of Capitol Hill knows that some of the shortest legislative language can lead to some of the most dramatic reversals of law. Pick a random statute, add or remove the word “not,” then imagine the consequences.
It is important to keep this inverse relationship between text and impact in mind when reviewing draft legislation [...]

A colleague noted that our blog entry on an author who plagiarized others’ work and then defended it as a generational issue was quoted in a Sunday New York Times piece by Randy Kennedy:
Patrick Ross, executive director of the Copyright Alliance, a trade group involving movie studios, networks and artists, took to the alliance’s blog [...]

Copyright Alliance Executive Director Patrick Ross today weighs in on fair use versus free use in a guest column for Photo Business News & Forum: Fair Use of Copyrighted Works - A Reasoned Perspective.

I came across a breath of fresh air today from the academic community — a professor who takes offense at the notion that unauthorized infringement of a creator’s works should be viewed as some kind of a just social movement.
U. of California at Berkeley Law Professor Peter S. Menell has authored a short work titled [...]

It would seem that Helene Hegemann is a talented, creative young woman. One wonders what sort of fiction she could have created had she simply “stood on the shoulders of giants” and written an original work inspired by past literary giants. Instead, she decided to cut and paste pages of published literary works and pass [...]

While snowbound this week I read some pieces in The Washington Post about condescension. The first author wrote a piece titled “Why are liberals so condescending?” He maintained that liberals are “committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but [...]

One truism about copyright is that one person’s inconvenience is another person’s absolute must. Passions brew on both sides, this is not new. What is interesting is when people switch sides.
One recent example of this involves attorneys Joe Sibley and Kiwi Camara. You may remember these two as the defenders of Jammie Thomas in her [...]

A recurring theme in criticism of copyright is that this isn’t really about individual creators. They are merely victims of The Man. Distributors use their market power to maximize profit, and that comes at the expense of creators.
Okay. Any individual creator, unless they occupy the far left of the Pareto Curve up where massive profits [...]

Building on my last post, which focused on the “exclusive right” granted by the first U.S. Congress to authors and inventors, as guided by the U.S. Constitution, let me address briefly the rights that users of creative works often claim for themselves. I am an avid consumer of creative works myself, and understand that it’s [...]

One of the wonderful things about the U.S. Constitution is that it gives lawmakers and judges discretion in application of law. Even strict constructionists have to admit that their interpretation of original intent is in fact an interpretation. I mention this to address the varying interpretations of the Progress Clause — the origin of current [...]