The RIAA has now sued or threatened to sue more than 28,000 people in the United States, in most cases extracting settlements of several thousand dollars from college students, housewives, and families with precocious preteens who downloaded music from Grokster, Kazaa, LimeWire, or BearShare. In many cases the infractions alleged are minimal (e.g., 5 songs) [...]
Entries from May 28th, 2010
The RIAA Will Sue Your Grandma
May 28th, 2010 · Comments Off · Copyright, Technology
Tags:Copyright·infringement·music·RIAA
Now You Can’t Even Make Fun of Hitler
May 24th, 2010 · Comments Off · Copyright, Popular
Several weeks ago YouTube announced that it was taking down all the parody videos of Hitler’s explosive speech to his general staff — in which Bruno Ganz channels the ghost of Hitler and does a compelling embodiment of instantaneous psychotic rage — based on claims by the creators of the film Downfall that the viral [...]
And Not-So-Free Books
May 11th, 2010 · 2 Comments · Copyright
Yesterday I emoted a bit on the prospect of an all-information-all-the-time database which the public could access for free, and as exemplars of this paradigm shift away from market-driven pay-as-you-go access to information I cited Project Gutenberg and Google Books. While Project Gutenberg’s 30,000+ tomes are indeed free — really free — to anyone with [...]
Free Books!
May 10th, 2010 · Comments Off · Copyright, Technology
If you have ever read any space opera or even been a casual observer of sci-fi on television (e.g., Star Trek), you will be familiar with the idea that one of the advances civilization finally manages to accomplish with the advent of advanced computing capabilities is the information net, where all human knowledge and data [...]
I am a commercial litigator and intellectual property lawyer in San Francisco. Although my practice encompasses a wide variety of business disputes, I have a particular fondness for, and am prone to wax philosophical on, the subjects of copyright and trademark infringement in music, literature, art, and film.
