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A 1909 Act work for hire puzzle

Olen York sent me this question awhile back. I would be interested in what people think. It involves the interplay between the 1909 Act and Section 303 of the 1976 Act. Here it is, slightly revised: A...

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Judge Posner on Attorney's Fees to Defendants

Yesterday, Judge Posner handed down an opinion in Eagle Services Corp. v. H20 Industrial Services that is sure to cited by many future defendants who prevail and seek their attorney's fees. In a jury...

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Eleventh Circuit: Fair Use, Laches, and Kitchen Sink

The Eleventh Circuit has been on a copyright tear in the last two weeks. In addition to the en banc opinion in the Greenberg - National Geographic Society case, there was a highly technical opinion on...

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Lassie Rescued Again

The Ninth Circuit has saved the copyright in Lassie for its authors' heirs, rejecting a patently frivolous claim by Classic Media, Inc. that a woefully inadequate transfer defeated the heirs'...

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The Strange Copyright World of Warcraft

The trial court has handed down its summary judgment opinion in MDY Industries, LLC v. Blizzard Entertainment, Inc., involving the multiplayer online role-playing game "World of Warcraft" and a bot...

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EU Press Release on Term Extension

Here is a link to the EU's Press Release today proposing the extension of term for sound recordings from 50 to 95 years. As the Press Release notes, there is an additional proposal to deal with the...

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Preemption and Mutant Copyright

In Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 539 U.S. 23, 31 (2003), Justice Scalia phrased the question to be decided this way:[A]s it comes to us, the gravamen of respondents' claim is that,...

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The Facebook Suit

The lawsuit filed by Facebook in California against the German site StudiVZ (and StudiVZ’s declaratory judgment action against Facebook in a German court) has been all over the newspapers and...

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The EU Railroads Term Extension

I have avoided commenting on the EU's proposed 45 year extension for sound recordings because the effort is so clearly wrong, so clearly another example of politicians ignoring the public interest in...

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The Declaration on the Three-Step test

On April 2d, I did a post on the counter-reformation against amendments to copyright laws in the public interest. It is, apparently, not enough for some copyright holders that their rights have...

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Infringement and the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act

May a foreign government be sued in U.S. courts for infringement occurring in the United States? The answer, provided by the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, 28 U.S.C.A. §§ 1602 to 1611, is no....

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Open Access and the NIH

In 1978, in enacting Section 105 of title 17, Congress faced a choice about what to do with copyrighted works that result from government funding, including basic research funding of scientific,...

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Is there such a thing as holding legal title to a registration?

The question in the title was posed by a decision filed yesterday in Tom Bean v. McDougal Littell (a division of the Houghton Mifflin Company) and R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company, No. 07-8063-PCT-JAT...

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US Government Insists on Right to Violate DMCA

I previously did a posting on the US government’s successful invocation of sovereign immunity in a claim alleging copyright infringement and an anti-circumvention claim under the DMCA. The opinion in...

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Educators Forced to Become MPAA's Cops

On July 30th, the House and Senate conferees approved the Higher Education Act reauthorization conference report, H.R. Rep. 110-803, to H.R. 4137. The bill, expected to become law soon, includes the...

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It was a Crime Alright but was it Pled Properly?

The Sixth Circuit just handed down a case that involves unusual questions of pleading in a criminal indictment, United States v. Teh. Defendant ThianTeh was arrested at the Detroit airport after flying...

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End of the Blog

I have decided to end the blog, after doing around 800 postings over about 4 years. I regret closing the blog and I owe readers an explanation. There are two reasons.1. The Inability or Refusal to...

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Archiving the Blog

It may sound trite to say I am overwhelmed by the response to ending the blog, but I am. I have read all the requests to either restore old posts or create an archive of them. As much care as I gave to...

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Restoring Old Posts

The voice of the people has been heard. I will restore the posts, hopefully by tomorrow. This is not what I would prefer, but I respect that almost everyone else feels differently, other than those...

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In Memoriam Sir Hugh Laddie

Baruch dyan ha-emet.“Blessed is the Judge of Truth,” is an expression uttered when one hears news of a terrible loss, especially death. It is the expression I used when I heard of the death of Sir...

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Barbara Ringer

Former Register of Copyrights Barbara Ringer died this morning at 83. A very private person, there will be no ceremony. It is impossible to overstate Barbara's contributions to U.S. copyright law,...

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My "new" fair use book

West Publishing just put out a "new" treatise of mine on fairuse in copyright. Here is a link to buy it ($200, free shipping!). "New" is in quotes because the book goes back to 1985, when BNA published...

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Rocky Mountain Ratings

A recent decision by a district court in Colorado, Health Grades, Inc., v.  Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, Inc. (HT to Eric Goldman and Mike Masnick at Techdirt) raises once again courts’...

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My new blog

I launched a new blog today, called Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars. Here's the link. The blog is based on a book I just published of the same title, available here and here.

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The Singaporean Cablevision Case

Many countries around the world are wrestling with similar, evolving copyright issues in response to new digital technologies. In facing common issues, courts sometimes share insights, but when they...

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