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'Fixing' fair use

Kevin Smith at Duke University Libraries: "Fixing" Fair Use?

Important ruling for fair use

Here's a significant victory for content creators, courtesy of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

A judge's ruling today is a major victory for free speech and fair use on the Internet, and will help protect everyone who creates content for the Web. In Lenz v. Universal (aka the "dancing baby" case), Judge Jeremy Fogel held that content owners must consider fair use before sending takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA").

Copyleft, copyright and everything in between

MediaRights: Copyleft, Copyright and Everything in Between.

Bad news for Facebook's Scrabulous

Associated Press: Bad News For Facebook's Scrabulous.

At the uneasy intersection of bloggers and the law

From the NY Times last week: At the Uneasy Intersection of Bloggers and the Law.

Where did 'Ally' go?

Newsweek's July 7-14 issue: Where did 'Ally' go? (can't find the link online)

The Fox TV series is available on DVD in Brain, Hong Kong, Belgium and beyond, but not in the United States. The reason: The rights to many songs featured in the show ("What Becomes of the Broken Hearted," etc.) are too expensive to DVD release here. The same problem applies to the '60s infused "The Wonder Years."

Susan Crawford on threats to the Internet

At Supernova, Nick Douglas interviews IP big thinker Susan Crawford about global threats to the Internet. She points out that Sept. 22 is the third annual One Web Day.

Let my video go

Catching up on stuff. From the March issue of Wired magazine: Dear Hollywood Studios: Let My Video Go. Excerpt:

We have the bandwidth, the compression algorithms, and the Ethernet connections — not to mention TiVos, Apple TVs, and Vudus — for downloading movies directly to the TV. We should no longer have to drive to the video store or wait for the mail carrier. But that's not the case. The entertainment industry is blowing it once again.

To succeed in the digital realm, Hollywood needs to offer total convenience, almost infinite choice, and the freedom to watch any way we want. Instead, we have iTunes, which delivers video you can't watch on any portable device that wasn't made by Apple, and Amazon Unbox and Netflix's Watch Instantly, which feature downloads you can't watch on any device that was made by Apple. And with a mere 1,000 downloadable movies for rent on iTunes, fewer than 5,000 on Amazon, and around 6,000 on Netflix, none of them offers anything close to the 90,000 DVDs available by mail. They can't, because Hollywood is determined to protect DVD sales at the expense of electronic downloads. That needs to be fixed — because if people don't find what they want at online storefronts, pirate copies are just a click away.

Copyright and the demise of newspapers

David Ardia at the IdeaLab blog: Copyright and the Demise of Newspapers.

Neil Netanel, a highly regarded legal scholar, has an interesting post on Balkinization entitled "The Demise of Newspapers: Economics, Copyright, Free Speech." Netanel, who has written extensively on copyright issues, posits that part of the reason for the decline in newspapers stems from Internet competitors that build on the content and value that newspapers create. He suggests that imposing a statutory license or levy on commercial Internet service providers and news aggregators might be a workable solution for ensuring that newspapers receive ompensation for their investment in quality reporting. ...

Legal Frontiers in Digital Media

The Media Law Resource Center, Stanford Publishing Courses and Stanford Law School Center for Internet & Society present Legal Frontiers in Digital Media, a conference on the emerging legal issues surrounding digital publishing and content distribution.

When: Thursday & Friday, May 15 & 16, 2008
Where: Stanford University
Details: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/5686
Register: http://publishingcourses.stanford.edu/legal-frontiers/