As digital piracy shifts away from torrent downloads and towards unauthorized streaming and theft-based extortion, stakeholders from all parts of the creativity community are reassessing their efforts to fight online infringement. This week, a global coalition of creators and leading on-demand entertainment services joined forces to better address the ever-evolving threat that piracy poses not only to artists and copyright owners, but to consumers and end users. Read more
Category: Copyright
From Star Wars to La La Land: How Intellectual Property Fuels Films
The following post comes from Mandi Hart, a rising third-year law student at Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University, who worked as a video producer before going to law school.
By Mandi Hart
Movies are a first-love in America and around the world, and their production is made possible by the existence of intellectual property (IP) rights. Read more
New CPIP Policy Brief: Open-Access Mandates and the Seductively False Promise of “Free”
CPIP has published a new policy brief entitled Open-Access Mandates and the Seductively False Promise of “Free.” The brief, written by CPIP Legal Fellow Bhamati Viswanathan and CPIP Director of Academic Programs & Senior Scholar Adam Mossoff, exposes the lack of evidence or justification for the proliferating legal mandates by federal agencies that coerce authors and publishers to make their scholarly articles available for free to the world. Read more
Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act is First Step Towards a Modern Copyright Office
The House Judiciary Committee today overwhelmingly approved the bipartisan Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act by a vote of 27-1. Introduced last Thursday by Chairman Bob Goodlatte and Ranking Member John Conyers, Jr.—with the support of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein, and Senator Patrick Leahy—the Act is the first legislative effort to follow a four-year review of U.S. Read more
Another Huge Setback in CloudFlare’s Quixotic Campaign to Protect Pirate Sites
Last August, I wrote about CloudFlare’s “desperate new strategy” to protect MP3Skull, a notorious pirate site that was sued by various recording companies for copyright infringement. CloudFlare offers content delivery networking, web optimization, and other performance services for websites. Read more
Kodi Software Enabling Widespread Copyright Infringement
Awards season always seems to arrive with new stories about how piracy is affecting the film industry and the way we watch movies. Whether it’s a promotional screener that was stolen and uploaded to a torrent site, or the latest software that allows users to download or stream pirated content, the tales are reminders of the enduring problem of online copyright infringement. Read more
Trusted Notifier Program Defended Against Misleading Rhetoric
One year ago, domain name registry Donuts, Inc. and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) entered into an agreement termed the Trusted Notifier Program in a joint effort to combat piracy. The voluntary initiative “introduced a new way to work towards mitigation of clear and pervasive cases of copyright infringement,” and according to Donuts’ one-year summary, has been a success for “rights owners, registrants and the public at large.” Read more
CPIP’s Sandra Aistars & Scalia Law Alumnae Urge Federal Circuit to Protect Creators and Rein In Fair Use in Oracle v. Google
On February 17, 2017, CPIP Senior Scholar Sandra Aistars filed an amicus brief in Oracle v. Google, a copyright case currently before the Federal Circuit. Prof. Aistars worked in conjunction with Scalia Law alumnae Antigone Peyton and Jennifer Aktins of Cloudigy Law and third-year law student Rebecca Cusey to file the brief on behalf of 13 intellectual property scholars, including CPIP’s Matthew Barblan, Devlin Hartline, Sean O’Connor, Eric Priest, and Mark Schultz. Read more
Shaping Fair Use to Promote Fair Markets
How does fair use policy in copyright law affect markets for the production and distribution of creative works? As we come to the end of Fair Use Week, it’s a good time to highlight a report by the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal and Economic Public Policy Studies, titled “Fair Use in the Digital Age,” that offers interesting insights into how we can optimize fair use to promote fair markets. Read more
Oracle v. Google: Expansive Fair Use Harms Creators
The following post comes from Rebecca Cusey, a third-year law student at Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University, and a movie critic at The Federalist.
By Rebecca Cusey
The fair use doctrine has expanded far beyond its purpose, according to an amicus brief filed this past Friday on behalf of 13 law professors in Oracle v. Read more