The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School is a leader in the study of the law and policy around the Internet and other emerging technologies.
Copyright and Fair Use
A healthy copyright system must balance the need to provide strong economic incentives through exclusive rights with the need to protect important public interests like free speech and expression. Fair use is foundational to that balance. It's role is to prevent copyright from stifling the creativity it is supposed to foster, and from imposing other burdens that would inhibit rather than promote the creation and spread of knowledge and learning.
The Fair Use Project (FUP) was founded in 2006 to provide legal support to a range of projects designed to clarify, and extend, the boundaries of fair use in order to enhance creative freedom and protect important public rights. It is the only organization in the country dedicated specifically to providing free and comprehensive legal representation to authors, filmmakers, artists, musicians and other content creators who face unmerited copyright claims, or other improper restrictions on their expressive interests. The FUP has litigated important cases across the country, and in the Supreme Court of the United States, and worked with scores of filmmakers and other content creators to secure the unimpeded release of their work.
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Non-Residential FellowJennifer Granick fights for civil liberties in an age of massive surveillance and powerful digital technology. As the new surveillance and cybersecurity counsel with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, she litigates, speaks, and writes about privacy, security, technology, and constitutional rights.
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Martin Husovec
Affiliate ScholarMartin Husovec is an Assistant Professor at the University of Tilburg (Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society & Tilburg Law and Economics Center). He is also a IMPRS-CI Doctoral Research Fellow at Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Affiliate Scholar at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet & Society (CIS) and Impact Litigator at European Information Society Institute (EISi), an independent non-profit organization based in Slovakia focusing on the overlap of technology, law & society.
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David Levine
Affiliate ScholarDavid S. Levine is an Associate Professor of Law at Elon University School of Law and an Affiliate Scholar at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School (CIS). He is also the founder and host of Hearsay Culture on KZSU-FM (Stanford University), an information policy, intellectual property law and technology talk show for which he has recorded over 190 interviews since May 2006. Hearsay Culture was named as a top five podcast in the ABA's Blawg 100 of 2008 and can be found at http://hearsayculture.com. -
Ryan E. Long
Non-Residential FellowRyan is a cooperating attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. Since starting his law practice over 10 years ago, he has been collaborating with clients to create and implement effective strategies to litigate over, or negotiate, sophisticated technology and media transactions. Before starting his practice in 2016, Ryan was an antitrust and securities litigator at Milberg LLP in New York City and a legal consultant to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C.
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Blockchain -- panacea or bubble?
By Ryan E. Long on March 11, 2018 at 4:17 pm
Block chain technology is taking the world by storm. From banking to health care, many tout block chain and the bit coin it enables as a cure-all. Others think bit coin is heading towards the edge. In between are those who see practical applications of block chain but caution on addiction to bit coin. On February 26th at the University of Copenhagen, I made a presentation entitled "Block chain technology -- good, bad, or somewhere in between?" This entry gives you a sneak preview of that talk.
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A Mixed Result for Cox in the Fourth Circuit
By Annemarie Bridy on February 4, 2018 at 7:51 am
The Fourth Circuit has issued its decision in BMG v. Cox. In case you haven’t been following the ins and outs of the suit, BMG sued Cox in 2014 alleging that the broadband provider was secondarily liable for its subscribers’ infringing file-sharing activity. In 2015, the trial court held that Cox was ineligible as a matter of law for the safe harbor in section 512(a) of the DMCA because it had failed to reasonably implement a policy for terminating the accounts of repeat infringers, as required by section 512(i). In 2016, a jury returned a $25M verdict for BMG, finding Cox liable for willful contributory infringement but not for vicarious infringement. Following the trial, Cox appealed both the safe harbor eligibility determination and the court’s jury instructions concerning the elements of contributory infringement. In a mixed result for Cox, the Fourth Circuit last week affirmed the court’s holding that Cox was ineligible for safe harbor, but remanded the case for retrial because the judge’s instructions to the jury understated the intent requirement for contributory infringement in a way that could have affected the jury’s verdict.
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Popularity doesn't equal truth.
By Ryan E. Long on January 25, 2018 at 3:59 pm
Popularity doesn't equal truth. And yet Facebook's recent proposal to rank the trustworthiness of news sources based on popularity is loosely equating truth with popularity. In so doing, Facebook may be putting form over function.
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A New Front in the Set-Top Box Piracy Wars: Can Sony’s Safe Harbor Save TickBox TV?
By Annemarie Bridy on November 26, 2017 at 5:34 pm
(NB: This headline does not obey Betteridge’s Law.)
Hollywood studios, led by Universal, have sued TickBox TV in federal district court in California, bringing their campaign against set-top box (STB) piracy stateside after a big win earlier this year in the EU. Last spring, the Dutch film and recording industry trade association BREIN prevailed in copyright litigation against the distributor of a STB called the Filmspeler. The CJEU held that the Filmspeler’s distributor, Wullems, directly infringed the plaintiffs’ copyrights—specifically, their right of communication to the public—by selling STBs loaded with software add-ons that provided easy access to infringing programming online. (I blogged about the Filmspeler case here.)
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Resisting the Resistance: Resisting Copyright and Promoting Alternatives
This article discusses the resistance to the Digital Revolution and the emergence of a social movement “resisting the resistance.” Mass empowerment has political implications that may provoke reactionary counteractions. Ultimately — as I have discussed elsewhere — resistance to the Digital Revolution can be seen as a response to Baudrillard’s call to a return to prodigality beyond the structural scarcity of the capitalistic market economy.
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Reforming Intermediary Liability in the Platform Economy: A European Digital Single Market Strategy
Since the enactment of the first safe harbours and liability exemptions for online intermediaries, market conditions have radically changed. Originally, intermediary liability exemptions were introduced to promote an emerging Internet market. Do safe harbours for online intermediaries still serve innovation? Should they be limited or expanded? These critical questions — often tainted by protectionist concerns — define the present intermediary liability conundrum. Apparently, safe harbours still hold, although secondary liability is on the rise.
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Murder (or not) at the Library of Congress?
Making Sense of the Recent Upheaval at the U.S. Copyright Office
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The music industry sings a lonely tune on Internet policy
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is at it again. In a joint open letter to Congress, it is leading a push by the music industry to rewrite Internet copyright law in ways similar to its advocacy of the infamous Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) of 2012. SOPA failed miserably in Congress. It was abandoned after more than 15 million Americans objected to the bill’s attempt to restrict Internet freedom as 115,000 websites staged a massive blackout online.
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Lang v. Morris
Sarah Morris is a well-known multimedia artist and filmmaker. In 2007, she debuted her "Origami" series, 24 paintings in which she reworked, redesigned, and reshaped origami crease patterns on canvas. Several origami artists sued Morris for copyright infringement, arguing Morris had unduly appropriated their allegedly copyrightable origami crease patterns in developing the "Origami" series. The Fair Use Project teamed up with attorneys Bob Clarida and Donn Zaretsky to defend Morris. We briefed the fair use issues on summary judgment.
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Associated Press v. Meltwater
Meltwater News ("Meltwater") is a search engine and research tool that allows users to search for and obtain information about news items that have been made publicly available on the Internet.
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Cariou v. Prince
We filed an amicus brief in the Second Circuit on behalf of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts urging the appeals court to reverse a district court decision that ignored established fair use principles that many artists rely upon in creating their work.
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Golan v. Holder
The FUP filed this suit on behalf of a University of Denver conductor and others, challenging Congress’s restoration of copyright to works that had entered the public domain.
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How Lexmark's patent fight to crush an ink reseller will affect us all
"Daniel Nazer, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents, said in a phone interview with The Register, "There's a risk companies will increasingly turn to patent law to do things they're not otherwise allowed to do."
Nazer pointed to a shampoo maker that tried unsuccessfully to block the importation of a product into the US by asserting a copyright claim on the shampoo bottle label. He observed that a design patent claim could be employed in an attempt to achieve the same anti-competitive result.
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Are Blockchain Patents a Bad Idea?
"Daniel Nazer, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Fortune that applications to patent the blockchain — which is a form of software — face a high hurdle due to a Supreme Court case called Alice. That decision ruled that most, or perhaps all, software patents are abstract ideas that are ineligible for patent protection.
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EFF’s Stupid Patent of the Month: Streaming cloud-based content
"US Patent No. 8,856,221 is called the "System and method for storing broadcast content in a cloud-based computing environment." In short, the invention claims ownership of a method to deliver media content from remote servers—the cloud, as we now know it—to computers.
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Vulcan™
"That’s something that just isn’t true, said Woodrow Hartzog, an associate professor at Samford University’s Cumberland School of Law and a former trademark examiner for the USPTO.
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Stanford Intermediary Liability Lab Meeting with the Takedown Project (Past Event)
The next SILLab meeting will be held on Tuesday, April 19 from 12.50 to 2pm in room 301 at SLS. -
Scale 14x (Past Event)
Hacking the Patent System: Open Source and Patents
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Copyright in the Age of Mass Digitization (Past Event)
JOIN US TO DISCUSS:
- What are the legal challenges associated with mass digitization?
- How have stakeholders, including tech corporations, Open Internet activists, publishers, libraries, artists, and authors, responded to those challenges?
- What policy changes may lie ahead?
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Fair Use In The Digital Age: The Ongoing Influence of Campbell v. Acuff-Rose's "Transformative Use Test" (Past Event)
For more information and to register visit the UW Law School website.
Thursday, April 16
6-8pm, Speakers' Dinner at the Watertown Hotel,
4242 Roosevelt Way NE,
Seattle, WA 98105
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Instagram made a Snapchat knockoff. Can they even do that?
May 26, 2017
""Ideas, before you actually put them to work, are very vulnerable to stealing," said University of California, Hastings law professor Ben Depoorter. "We give protection to someone who can make good on that idea, and put it into a particular application, practice, expression, art form.
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Public domain or copyrighted material?
November 19, 2015
The song “Happy Birthday” has a long, litigious history dating back to the 1930s. Every year, people spent millions in royalties to use the song, until a class action lawsuit was brought challenging whether the owner, Warner/Chappell Music, actually owned the copyright it so aggressively enforced. Elizabeth Townsend-Gard, Tulane School of Law professor specializing in copyright law, discusses the case of “Happy Birthday.”
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Prof. Andrea Matwyshyn - Hearsay Culture Show #244 - KZSU-FM
October 2, 2015
CIS Affiliate Scholar David Levine interviews Prof. Andrea Matwyshyn of Northeastern University Law School, on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the Volkswagen fraud scandal.
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Appeals Court Rules Youtube Video Of Baby Dancing To Prince Was Fair Use
September 15, 2015
Read or listen to the full interview at NPR.
NPR's Audie Cornish talks to Daniel Nazer of the Electronic Frontier Foundation about the impact of this ruling. An appeals court ruled the music used in the video was an instance of fair use.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
When Stephanie Lenz saw her toddler jamming out in the kitchen to the Prince song "Let's Go Crazy," naturally she took a video and posted it to YouTube.
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