Beneath the Blindfold
By Documentary Film Program • January 31, 2012 at 1:02 pm
FOUR SURVIVORS, ONE TRUTH
THIS SHOULD NOT HAPPEN TO ANYONE Read more » about Beneath the Blindfold
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.
By Documentary Film Program • January 31, 2012 at 1:02 pm
FOUR SURVIVORS, ONE TRUTH
THIS SHOULD NOT HAPPEN TO ANYONE Read more » about Beneath the Blindfold
By Documentary Film Program • January 31, 2012 at 12:59 pm
In 1991, Cameron Todd Willingham’s three daughters died in a Corsicana, Texas house fire. Tried and convicted for their arson murders, Willingham spent twelve years on death row, and was executed despite overwhelming expert criticism of the prosecution’s arson evidence. Today, Willingham's name has become a call for reform in the field of forensics and a rallying cry for the anti-death penalty movement; yet he remains an indisputable "monster" in the eyes of Texas Governor Rick Perry, who ignored the science that could have saved Willingham’s life. Read more » about INCENDIARY: The Willingham Case
By Documentary Film Program • January 31, 2012 at 12:55 pm
The husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames are widely regarded as America’s most important designers. Perhaps best remembered for their mid-century plywood and fiberglass furniture, the Eames Office also created a mind-bending variety of other products, from splints for wounded military during World War II, to photography, interiors, multi-media exhibits, graphics, games, films and toys. But their personal lives and influence on significant events in American life – from the development of modernism, to the rise of the computer age – has been less widely understood. Read more » about Eames: The Architect and the Painter
By Documentary Film Program • January 31, 2012 at 12:47 pm
Casablanca Mon Amour is a modern road movie that encapsulates the more complex and fractured nature of living in a world where TV and wars compete for headlines and occupy imaginations.
Using movies as a road map between yesterday’s Hollywood and today’s Morocco, Casablanca Mon Amour offers a Moroccan perspective on the long and entwined relationship between Hollywood and The Arab/Muslim World. Read more » about Casablanca Mon Amour
Daily/Journal Op/Ed
The first part of this article outlined the mechanics of the Megaupload website, and the novel questions of criminal inducement on which the government's indictment is premised. Here, we explore two more extensions of existing law on which the indictment is based, and the impact this prosecution is likely to have on Internet innovators and users alike. Read more » about Megaupload Indictment Leaves Everyone Guessing - Part 2
Days after anti-piracy legislation stalled in Congress, the U.S. Department of Justice coordinated an unprecedented raid on the Hong Kong-based website Megaupload.com. New Zealand law enforcement agents swooped in by helicopter to arrest founder Kim Dotcom at his home outside of Auckland, and seized millions of dollars worth of art, vehicles and real estate. Six other Megaupload employees were also arrested. Meanwhile, the Justice Department seized Megaupload's domain names and the data of at least 50 million users worldwide. Read more » about Megaupload.com Indictment Leaves Everyone Guessing - Part 1
It is now received wisdom that a properly functioning democracy requires transparency and accountability — information shared with the public that allows the public to know what its government is doing. It is equally uncontroversial to say that social media allows for an unprecedented amount of informal but structured dissemination and analysis of information. Despite these two basic points, U.S. freedom of information law has failed to harness the power of these new social media networks and, more importantly, formats in a way that amplifies public knowledge of government information. Read more » about The Social Layer of Freedom of Information Law
This is the third in a series of articles focusing on the experimental economics of intellectual property. In earlier work, we have experimentally studied the ways in which creators assign monetary value to the things that they create. That research has suggested that creators are subject to a systematic bias that leads them to overvalue their work. Read more » about Valuing Attribution and Publication in Intellectual Property
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. Read more » about Associated Press v. Meltwater
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. Read more » about Cariou v. Prince
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. Read more » about Golan v. Holder
We filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Electronic Frontier Foundation asking the First Circuit to affirm the district court’s reduced damages award in Sony v. Tenenbaum, a file-sharing case in which a jury originally ordered a college student to pay $675,000 for infringing copyright in 30 songs. Read more » about Sony v. Tenenbaum
Randy Moore’s dark drama Escape From Tomorrow premiered this week at the Sundance Film Festival and quickly became one of the most buzzed-about oddities in Park City, Utah. Reviews have been mixed but unquestionably intriguing. There’s a chance, though, that the rest of us won’t be able to form our own opinions: Escape From Tomorrow was filmed without permission on location at Disney’s theme parks in Orlando, Fla., and Anaheim, Calif., and it unabashedly incorporates the familiar logos, characters, and theme-park images in a perverse dramatic narrative. Read more » about Will Disney Let You See This Movie?
The AP's argument is "unfounded and dangerous to innovation," according to the brief authored by Julie Ahrens, of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet & Society. Read more » about DVR Protections Invoked to Pause Associated Press
For more information please visit STLR's website. Read more » about Copyright in the Digital Age - 16th Annual Stanford Technology Law Review Symposium
Please join us as we gather to remember Aaron Swartz on the evening of Thursday, January 24th.Four Factors In Search Of a Question: Anchoring Fair Use to Free Expression and Social Value Read more » about Four Factors In Search Of a Question: Anchoring Fair Use to Free Expression and Social Value
During late 2011 and January 2012, millions of people protested the passage of the controversial copyright bill the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in Congress. The protests culminated in the largest online protest in the history of the Internet, with web giant Wikipedia and thousands of other websites going black in a day of self-censorship. In a few short months, the protesters achieved something remarkable: they defeated money, politicians, Hollywood, and the copyright lobby, all in the name of a “free and open Internet.” This talk with Professor Edward Lee, explains these grassroots movements as a form of popular constitutionalism. Courts didn't define speech rights. People did. And, in the end, it was the people's view of free speech that carried the day. Read more » about CIS Speaker Series - Stopping SOPA: Copyright, Free Speech, and Popular Constitutionalism
May 16, 2013
Three dimensional printing turns bits into atoms. The technology is simply amazing. These machines draw on programming, art and engineering to enable people to design and build intricate, beautiful, functional jewelry, machine parts, toys and even shoes. In the commercial sector, 3D printing can revolutionize supply chains as well. As the public interest group Public Knowledge wrote once, "It will be awesome if they don't screw it up."
Read more » about 3D Printing: Is the Law Ready for the Future?
May 10, 2013
Hosts: Denise Howell and Evan Brown
Prenda, Paramount product placement, technology legislation, and more.
Guests: Polk Wagner and Julie Ahrens.
Download or subscribe to this show at twit.tv/twil. Read more » about This Week in Law - Episode 210: Into the Prenda Darkness
March 13, 2013
CIS Affiliate Scholar David Levine interviews Dave Seubert, head of the University of California Santa Barbara’s Cylinder Digitization and Preservation Project. Read more » about Dave Seubert - Hearsay Culture - Show #181 - KZSU-FM
November 16, 2012
During late 2011 and January 2012, millions of people protested the passage of the controversial copyright bill the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in Congress. The protests culminated in the largest online protest in the history of the Internet, with web giant Wikipedia and thousands of other websites going black in a day of self-censorship. Read more » about Stopping SOPA - Copyright, Free Speech, and Popular Constitutionalism (Video)