9 posts and columns on copyright law

YouTube and Viacom Find Lots of Emails, but No Smoking Gun

in Media on March 18, 2010 at 7:25 pm PT

The YouTube-Viacom documents released today are chock full of interesting morsels. Feel free to ignore most of them.

Oh My God! They Still Haven’t Deposed Kenny!

in Media on January 4, 2010 at 1:20 pm PT

Yup, Viacom and Google are still locked in a high-stakes court battle over YouTube, copyright law and money. Which means they’re finally getting around to deposing star witnesses like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. The “South Park” dudes appear to be acting out, however.
southpark

Court Kills Preposterous Pirate Beatles Site

in Media on November 18, 2009 at 4:05 pm PT

It’s official: You still can’t buy the Beatles’ songs on the Web, despite the efforts of a site that attempted to do so by rewriting copyright law on the fly. In other news: Have you seen this clip of Richard Pryor reading the alphabet on Sesame Street? Awesome.
beatlesforsale

Google’s Mission: To Digitize the World’s Books and Make Them Universally Monetizable by Google

in News on November 16, 2009 at 12:40 pm PT

Google, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers have submitted a new version of their digital book settlement, and while it makes concessions to the Department of Justice and others who have raised concerns about how it may violate antitrust laws, the new proposal doesn’t seem to have appeased all of its opponents.
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Voices

EMI Sues Site Over Beatles Songs

in News on November 5, 2009 at 5:00 am PT

The Beatles catalog finally became available for paid digital downloading, but not the way the band’s record label, EMI Group Ltd., intended.

Google to Create World’s Largest Searchable Archive of Arguments Against Google Books

in News on September 11, 2009 at 8:07 am PT

Add another name to the list of opponents of the Google Book Search Settlement: Marybeth Peters, U.S. Register of Copyrights. In testimony before the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Thursday, Peters tarred the deal as “fundamentally at odds with the law” and villainized Google, saying the company is making a “mockery” of the copyright protections in the U.S. Constitution.
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Voices

Internet Archive Founder Questions Google Books Settlement

in News on May 19, 2009 at 12:10 pm PT

Will the settlement agreement between Google’s Book Search Library Project and authors and publishers put Google in monopoly territory? That’s the argument that Brewster Kahle, co-founder of the Internet Archive, made in an op-ed in the Washington Post, in which he writes that the settlement “provides a new and unsettling form of media consolidation.”
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