Category Law
Book Excerpt: The Saga of Royalties for Radio Play of Recorded Music
It’s been a while since I’ve written here. There’s a reason for that: I’ve been working on a book. I’m working with Howie Singer — digital music pioneer at AT&T, former head of technology strategy at Warner Music Group, and fellow adjunct faculty in NYU’s Music Business program — on a book about the history […]
Spotify Brings Music into Podcasts
(This is my first article in a while; I have been working on a larger-scale writing project over the past couple of months, about which I hope to be able to share more soon. I am also in discussions with the Copyright Society of the USA about the next Copyright and Technology conference; we are […]
Copyright Office’s Section 512 Report Finds the Balance Askew
Five years ago, the U.S. Copyright Office commenced a study on Section 512 of the copyright law, the section that defines limitations of copyright liability (“safe harbors”) for online service providers, arguably the most important part of American copyright law in the digital age. Last week the Office released the results of the study in […]
Wiley Reaches Detente with Academic Social Network ResearchGate
Academic and scientific researchers have their own social networks. One of the biggest differences between these services and LinkedIn or Twitter is that researchers are interested in other researchers’ content as much as they are in social interactions. This has led academic social networks to find ways of getting users to post their papers and […]
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 […]
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 […]
Copyright Office to Give Updates at January Conference
The U.S. Copyright Office has been involved in two important initiatives related to copyright and technology — and they’re going to talk about them at our next conference in NYC on January 16. Last month the USCO completed its latest rulemaking on exemptions to the law prohibiting circumvention of technical protection measures — e.g., hacks […]
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