FAIR USE! Read the opinion here. Read the set-up here. Factor by factor, the court reasoned: Transportation Alternatives’ use of the photograph was transformative, even though the purpose was to criticize the New York Post article, and the Post‘s use of the...
What Happens When the Way Your Licensee Used Your Work Comes in for Criticism? On August 6, 2018, the New York Post published this article, “Dockless Bikes Are Already Clogging NYC Sidewalks.” The journalists reported that, of 100 dockless bikes placed in a certain...
Yesterday, the Tennessee Supreme Court issued its ruling in the Funk v. Scripps Media case involving the fair report privilege and Tennessee’s statutory Shield Law. In a victory for speech advocates and the media, the Court held that the fair report privilege...
A New Kind of DMCA Abuse? Or Just Things Working as They Should? Earlier this week, a spotlight was shined on a fairly obscure part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). It involved a comedian, a funny video she made, a song called (I’m assured) “Slob on My...
Back in the eighties, the United States entered into the Berne Convention, a widely adopted international treaty to do away with a lot of the weird formalities that used to exist around copyright protection. Those formalities made it really easy for a content owner to...
To wrap up this short series about the dangers of written integrated contracts—see here about contracts meaning what they say, and here about “quantum contracts”—I’d like to put the lessons into a hypothetical that might feel a little familiar to you. Once Upon a Time...
