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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Brave New Films v. Savage - Order Denying Savage's Motion to Dismiss
Michael Savage’s motion to be dismissed as a defendant in Brave New Films’ wrongful DMCA takedown lawsuit was denied by Judge Illston on April 15.
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Fairey v. The Associated Press - Answer to AP Counterclaims
Answer to the AP's Counterclaims
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Golan v. Holder - District Court Order
The Court upheld our challenge to the constitutionality of the URAA's restoration of copyrights in public domain works. The Court granted our summary judgment motion, holding the URAA violates the First Amendment insofar as it suppresses parties' rights to keep using works they exploited when those works were in the public domain.
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Golan v. Holder - Plaintiffs' Reply in support of their Motion for Summary Judgment in the District Court
The Golan case was back before the District Court on remand to determine whether the URAA can survive First Amendment scrutiny. Each side cross-moved for summary judgment on that issue.
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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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Adult film producer Strike 3 Holdings settles copyright infringement case
"Firms such as Strike 3 sending scores of DMCA take-down notices to alleged copyright offenders that threaten them with lawsuits is “a lot of work for everyone,” Ben Depoorter, a professor at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, told the Northern California Record.
“It is an expensive strategy of issuing subpoenas, finding IP addresses and people’s identities,” Depoorter said."
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Appeals court revives Oracle's copyright claim against Google
"Annemarie Bridy, a professor of intellectual property at the University of Idaho College of Law, said in an interview the ruling could stifle software innovation by opening up developers to potential liability for copyright infringement.
“This is a ruling that could have a significant chilling effect on software developers,” she said, noting that they rely on computer code like Oracle’s to make apps communicate with each other."
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Hecla takes aim at critical film with copyright claim
"“This was a classic case of a documentary commenting on a mine and using some of a promotional video as part of that documentary,” said Daniel Nazer, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group based in San Francisco."
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Linking Is Not Copyright Infringement, Boing Boing Tells Court
"“Boing Boing’s reporting and commenting on the Playboy photos is protected by copyright’s fair use doctrine,” EFF Senior Staff Attorney Daniel Nazer says, commenting on the case."
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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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Marketplace Tech for Thursday, March 20, 2014
March 20, 2014
Listen here.
CIS Director of Copyright and Fair Use, Julie Ahrens, starts at 2:08.
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Visual and Critical Studies Copyright Forum
March 5, 2014
View the YouTube video here.
The Visual and Critical Studies Copyright Forum features conversations around milestone copyright case studies of significance to artists, scholars, and critics. Moderated by Matteo Bittanti, the Copyright Forum introduces basic concepts of "fair use" policies and how best to navigate requesting permissions for work in a professional arts setting.
Copyright Forum moderated by CCA faculty Matteo Bittanti with special guests:
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Prof. Susan Sell - Hearsay Culture Show #205 - KZSU-FM
February 26, 2014
CIS Affiliate Scholar David Levine interviews Prof. Susan Sell of the Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University on international relations and transparency.
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Copyright, Fair Use, and the Academy: Research, Teaching, and Libraries
February 3, 2014
Julie Ahrens, CIS Director of Copyright and Fair Use participated in a panel and workshop hosted by the Hoover Institution Library and Archives and conducted by Kenneth D. Crews titled Copyright, Fair Use, and the Academy: Research, Teaching, and Libraries.
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