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
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’
“What I find troubling about it is that she keeps distinguishing Meltwater versus ‘legitimate’ online search tools, but it’s not really clear what that definition is,” Julie Ahrens, director of copyright and fair use for the Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet & Society, told MLex in an interview Friday.
Download PDF of Mlex article. Read more » about Comment: AP win in copyright ruling could put search startups at risk
Tim Wu is an author, policy advocate and author of The Master Switch. He is a professor at Columbia Law School, the chairman of media reform organization Free Press, and is working for the FTC as a senior advisor. Wu was recognized in 2006 as one of 50 leaders in science and technology by Scientific American magazine, and in 2007 Wu was listed as one of Harvard's 100 most influential graduates by 02138 magazine. Read more » about 5/9: CIS Speaker Series: Tim Wu discusses his new book THE MASTER SWITCH
Updated 5/10/2011
Check out pictures from the CIS Speaker Series Talk - A Defensive Patent License Proposal Read more » about 5/2: CIS Speaker Series - A Defensive Patent License Proposal
Anthony Falzone and Mark Schultz will debate whether significant developments in U.S. copyright law protects or violates individual freedom. Falzone, Executive Director of the Fair Use Project and a Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School, will evaluate the affects of copyright law on freedom of expression, while Prof. Schultz will assess the affects of copyright law on the liberty of IP creators and owners. Professor Paul Goldstein will moderate. Professor Paul Goldstein will moderate. Lunch will be served. Hosted by the Stanford Federalist Society Read more » about 4/27: Intellectual Property and Individual Liberty: Friends or Foes
Updated April 27, 2011Check out photos from the Joseph Gordon-Levitt talk.
hitRECORD.org is a project Joseph Gordon-Levitt started almost five years ago. They have evolved into a professional open production company that creates and develops art and media collaboratively. Rather than just exhibiting and admiring each other's work as isolated individuals, they invite users to gather and collectively work on projects together. Read more » about 4/25: Copyright, Remix and the Art of Collaborative Media: A conversation with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Anthony Falzone
August 10, 2012
CIS Affiliate Scholar David Levine interviews Profs. Francesca Coppa of Muhlenberg College and Tisha Turk of the University of Minnesota at Morris on vidding. Read more » about Francesca Coppa and Tisha Turk - Hearsay Culture - Show #167 - KZSU-FM
May 14, 2012
This week, David Levine interviews Prof. Daniel Margocsy of Hunter College, co-editor of States of Secrecy, a forthcoming volume of the British Journal for the History of Science. Read more » about Daniel Margocsy - Hearsay Culture - Show #162 - KZSU-FM
May 14, 2012
This week, David Levine interviews Prof. Hamilton Bean of the University of Colorado Denver, author of the book No More Secrets: Open Source Information and the Reshaping of U.S. Intelligence. Read more » about Hamilton Bean - Hearsay Culture - Show #161 - KZSU-FM
May 7, 2012
In July 2012, several major internet access providers (including, very likely, yours) will roll out a new program supposedly intended to inhibit online infringement via peer top peer file-sharing networks. The program is a result of a deal, announced last year, between ISPs and big content providers to work together police online infringement, educate allegedly infringing subscribers and, if subscribers resist such education, take various steps including restricting their internet access. As always, the devil is in the details, and the details here are devilish indeed. EFF Intellectual Property Director Corynne McSherry outlined how the program will work and explained why subscribers might want to demand a reboot. Read more » about Is Your ISP Becoming A Copyright Cop? The Graduated Response Program and "Voluntary" Efforts to Police Online Infringement