Fair Use Has a Weird Relationship with Trademark By now you know that fair use is a squishy, fact-intensive, unpredictable but absolutely necessary feature of copyright law. But at least fair use’s role in copyright law is well understood. It’s just hard to apply....
We’ve known for a long time that websites that collect user information need a privacy policy. We also know that in the U.S. at least, the laws on protecting information that isn’t medical records or financial records is pretty, well, non-existent. You can do a lot...
If You Call it Art, Is it Automatically Fair Use? By now you’ve probably heard that Richard Prince is a jerkface. Or that he is a trolling genius. I am not here to dispute either of those things. They are not mutually exclusive, for one thing. To the contrary,...
Wherein we Also Discuss Whether Hyperlinks Can Be Infringing Ellen Seidler, an independent filmmaker with one movie under her belt, wonders why her attempt to get Chilling Effects, the aggregator of DMCA takedown notices, to take down her own earlier DMCA takedown...
Implied Licenses Are a Last Resort In the day-to-day counseling about copyright matters, this is perhaps the most common fact pattern, and it’s surprisingly sticky. Company X has hired creative firm Y to create something for it. “It” could be almost anything: computer...
Holden Caulfield Watches a 70’s Sitcom. Hilarity Doesn’t Ensue. If television shows are as influential as most people assume they are, I’m amazed that I wound up a productive member of society1Insert your dumb lawyer joke here, I guess.. My parents let me...
