Negative Liberty and What the First Amendment Ought to Be
By Marvin Ammori • February 3, 2012 at 2:00 pm
Cross posted from Marvin Ammori's post at Concurring Opinions. Read more » about Negative Liberty and What the First Amendment Ought to Be
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 Marvin Ammori • February 3, 2012 at 2:00 pm
Cross posted from Marvin Ammori's post at Concurring Opinions. Read more » about Negative Liberty and What the First Amendment Ought to Be
By Brett Frischmann • February 3, 2012 at 11:05 am
This post is cross-posted at Concurring Opinions, which is having a blog symposium on Marvin Ammori's excellent article on First Amendment Architecture. Next week, the Stanford Technology Law Review is holding its “First Amendment Challenges in the Digital Age” conference and one of the panels also will center on the piece. So it is getting a lot of attention!
... Read more » about Thoughts on Ammori's Free Speech Architecture and the Golan decision
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
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 - Amicus Brief
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. Read more » about Lang v. Morris
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
CIS Director of Civil Liberties Jennifer Granick is interviewed in the PBS Show Constitution USA with Peter Sagal. Read more » about Constitution USA with Peter Sagal
The MPAA says that if an artist suing the league is victorious at an appeals court, it could raise problems for movies containing logos, signs, billboards and other copyrighted works. Read more » about Why Hollywood Studios Care About the NFL's Baltimore Ravens Logo
Julie Ahrens, an attorney for the amici, noted Tuesday that the MPAA, the International Documentary Association and Film Independent aren't always necessarily on the same side of the fair use issue. The fact that they all teamed up in this case testifies to the importance of the kind of uses that could be affected by the appeals court's ruling, as well as the well-settled state of the legal precedent in this area, she said.
“We don't want the Fourth Circuit to jeopardize that case law,” she told Law360. Read more » about Ravens Logo Appeal Threatens Filmmaker Rights, MPAA Says
""It's a terrible patent," says Daniel Nazer, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and its exemplary Patent Busting Project. "It's a classic example of the patent office not doing a good job."" Read more » about EFF patent lawyer rates lawyer-rating patent ‘terrible’
This intensive event over two days is designed for lawyers and Web publishing professionals responsible for sorting out the emerging legal issues surrounding the distribution of content on digital platforms. Read more » about Legal Frontiers in Digital Media
The program committee for We Robot: Getting Down To Business invites you to join us for the second annual robotics and the law conference to take place April 8 and 9 at Stanford Law School. This year’s event is focused on the immediate commercial prospects of robotics and will include panels and papers on a wide variety of topics, including: Read more » about We Robot: Getting Down to Business
Presenter: Julie Ahrens
Fair Use is an important doctrine allowing use of copyrighted works without the owner’s consent in certain situations. But documentary filmmakers and producers of online content under utilize the fair use doctrine in their work. The creation and circulation of information to the public, and public debate, is shaped and limited as a result. This session will explore the fundamentals of fair use, as well as what may and may not be permissible, best practices and new developments. Read more » about Fair Use: Now More than Ever
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)
November 6, 2012
The extent to which internet intermediaries such as Facebook and Google should be liable for unlawful content on the internet is currently facing a great deal of scrutiny in Europe. Like in the US, internet intermediaries in Europe are expected to assist in the prevention of copyright infringement. However, they do not have the wide protection against defamation and privacy claims provided by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act 1996 in the US. Over the last few years, they have therefore found themselves being named in lawsuits in respect of user-generated content. Read more » about Intermediary Liability on the Internet - Ashley Hurst - Video
November 6, 2012
The extent to which internet intermediaries such as Facebook and Google should be liable for unlawful content on the internet is currently facing a great deal of scrutiny in Europe. Like in the US, internet intermediaries in Europe are expected to assist in the prevention of copyright infringement. However, they do not have the wide protection against defamation and privacy claims provided by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act 1996 in the US. Over the last few years, they have therefore found themselves being named in lawsuits in respect of user-generated content. Read more » about Intermediary Liability on the Internet - Ashley Hurst - Audio