Category First Sale / Exhaustion
Are NFTs DRM by Another Name?
Twenty years ago, when the first generation of DRM technologies hit the market, one of the benefits they touted was that with DRM-packaged files, consumers could be sure that they were getting the genuine content from the source. For example, if the content was a scientific journal article with research results, they could be confident […]
The Internet Archive’s Copyright Emergency
Sometime last year, I was chatting about digital first sale and e-lending with a highly respected copyright lawyer, someone who is deeply knowledgeable about those issues. We were talking about the library community’s longstanding attempts to get a lending right for digital files in law. We noted that those folks have apparently given up on […]
Conference Coming Up January 15; Program Changes
A reminder that our eleventh annual Copyright and Technology Conference is coming up on Wednesday, January 15 at Fordham Law School in NYC, co-produced by the Copyright Society of the USA and sponsored by the good folks at the Fordham Intellectual Property Institute. Online registration is still available. I’d like to announce a couple of […]
EU High Court Rules Against Digital Resale; We’ll Talk About This at the Conference
This week the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued a landmark ruling that digitally downloaded files are not subject to exhaustion (the EU equivalent of first sale in U.S. law). This means that consumers don’t have the right to resell (or give away, lend, or rent) ebooks and other digital files. This […]
Libraries Take E-Book Lending Fight into Antitrust Territory
The U.S. library community has gotten involved in the investigation that Congress recently opened into possible anticompetitive behavior by Big Tech. The American Library Association, the advocacy group for public and academic libraries, sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee last week complaining of unfair behavior from Amazon as well as Big Five trade […]
CJEU’s Advocate General Finds No Resale Right for Digital Files
The European Union’s highest court is likely to rule that, as with ReDigi in the U.S., it’s not legal to resell digital content files without the copyright owner’s permission.
For Digital First Sale, It’s Still 2001
Seventeen years ago, the U.S. Copyright Office — Congress’s official advisor on copyright issues — published an opinion for Congress on whether there should be a first sale right for digital content: a right for consumers to alienate (sell, lend, rent, or give away) digital files, like the one that exists for physical items like […]
Blockchain Comes to E-Books, DRM Included
Blockchain technology has reached e-books. The CEOs of two startups with e-book distribution platforms based on blockchains, Scenarex and Publica, are going to appear with me on a panel at the Digital Book World conference in Nashville in early October. The similarities of their technologies indicate a direction for blockchains in the e-book world. The […]
Judge’s Ruling in Redbox Case Raises Concerns for Physical/Digital Content Bundles
A ruling from a California district judge last month impacts an area we explore here from time to time: when you purchase a digital content product, what rights do you have to that product, and are you buying it or licensing it? Judge Dean Pregerson’s recent ruling in Disney v. Redbox helps define the boundaries between sale and […]
Libraries: Be Careful What You Wish For
Last week we discussed the new “cost-per-circulation” (CPC) model for public libraries — in which they can make e-books available to patrons and pay the publisher per “loan” instead of paying fixed fees to “acquire” titles as if they were print books (the “pretend it’s print” or PIP model). HarperCollins has just become the first […]
Copyright and Technology 
Recent Comments