The Computer and Communications Industry Association this week issued a white paper attempting to assign economic value to the fair use defense against copyright infringement by presenting combined data of industries that “depend on fair use and other limitations upon the regulatory reach of copyright laws”. The paper is interesting spin. Most of the jobs [...]

Is the theft of a writer’s words really any different than the theft of a musician’s recording, a songwriter’s composition, a photographer’s snapshot? We’ve been posting updates on our original post on the plagiarism by the New England magazine Cooks Source, but now I’ll post a new one on the heels of the magazine calling [...]

Repeat after me: “The web does not equal public domain.” Again: “The web does not equal public domain.” There, I knew you could say it. Someone needs to have that simple exchange with the editor of a magazine who boasts decades of experience in publishing but feels it’s fine to republish in her commercial magazine [...]

Thursday featured many Obama Administration officials speaking strongly about the importance of copyright enforcement at an event sponsored by the U.S. Commerce Department, but enforcement actions on Wednesday by the Administration spoke even louder than words. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other state and federal agencies, with the new “Operation in our Sites,” cut [...]

It’s been awhile since I’ve written about Shepard Fairey, the breaks-the-rules-and-boasts-of-it visual artist who is locked in a legal battle with the Associated Press over whether his use of an AP photo of Barack Obama to create the iconic red-and-blue image of the then-presidential candidate was copyright infringement. Well, the judge in the case has [...]

If you get your hands on 18 million books you don’t own, make full copies of them, and look to profit from them online, expect a bit of legal trouble. Google’s latest headache is from photographers and illustrators. You go, visual artists! Let me say up front that while the Copyright Alliance didn’t play a [...]

The core principle of copyright is that the creator and copyright owner has the right to reproduction, distribution, public performance and the creation of derivative works of his or her creativity. Take that away and copyright is meaningless. Some would like that result. Others want to keep placing limits on those rights by expanding fair [...]

We praised the FCC recently when it released its long-awaited National Broadband Plan. We share the FCC’s vision of a wired and wireless world of high-speed Internet connectivity. Creative industries are embracing the online market in new and innovative ways — see our In Syn(c) series for more — and the more robust and widespread [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]