Rick to Present at The Internet & the Law 2011
Rick will be presenting at The Internet & the Law 2011, which takes place all day Friday, December 30, at the Nashville School of Law. The tuition is $280, and it's good for 5 hours of General CLE credit, plus 1 hour of Dual CLE credit. Rick will be presenting on...
Elvish Is King: Parody in Trademark Cases
Is it Fair Use? Looks at Trademark We’ve already looked at the “Elf On/Elf Off” decision (CCA & B, LLC v. F + W Media Inc., N.D. Ga. Sept. 22, 2011) with respect to copyright infringement, but it also has an extensive fair use analysis for trademark. Here at Is it...
Tara Aaron to attend conferences on European Trademark Law and the new Top Level Domains
Tara will be attending the International Trademark Association's conferences this week, first on European Trademark Reforms and then on Trademarks and the Internet, following up on her own recent presentation on that same topic. We are thrilled that Tara has the...
ReDigi Finale: Comparing Apples to Amazons (Part 20 in Our Online Music Services Series)
And Other Loose Ends. This is going to be (I hope) the last post about the ReDigi situation, at least for a while. I'll admit I got distracted by the RIAA's little missive to ReDigi. I want to sum up and wrap up. First, the summing: The Three Legal Obstacles to a...
The Art of Ruling on the Free-Speech Right to Speak Online Anonymously
A Judge May Have Found a Better Way Courts have been struggling for several years now with how treat online anonymous speech when faced with requests to unmask the identities of the anonymous speakers. I outlined the issues previously in these two blog posts, but the...
ReDigi Redux: Essentials of the Essential Step Defense (Part 16 of our Online Music Services Series)
Digital Content: Dumb Data or Clever Instructor? I received so many comments on my ReDigi post that I need to write a couple of follow-up posts to address the good questions. This post and the next will focus on questions raised about the fact that ReDigi needs to...
ReDigi RIAA ReDux: New Wine, Old Skins (Part 19 of Our Online Music Services Series)
What Old Cases Don't Teach us About New Tricks In my last post, we started to look at the legal claims made by the RIAA in the demand letter it sent to ReDigi. We focused on the plain language and legislative history of the first-sale statute--banged our heads against...
ReDigi: Can the First-Sale Doctrine Ever Apply to Digital Downloads? (Part 18 of our Online Music Series)
The RIAA Strikes Back So it turns out that the RIAA isn't cool with ReDigi. So much for the maybe-they're-secretly-licensed theory. You can read the RIAA’s demand letter to ReDigi here. It raises an issue I hadn’t considered before, so wrapped up was I in applying...
Global Entrepreneurship Week
As Global Entrepreneurship Week kicks off, we at Aaron | Sanders Law thought we could share our thoughts about what entrepreneurship means to us. Yes, you, the entrepreneurs, are our clients - let’s just put that out there for the sake of full disclosure. But we refer...
ReDigi: Is the Necessary Step a Fair Use? (Part 17 of our Online Music Services Series)
When is Making Temporary, Intermediate Copies a Fair Use? Last time, we discussed whether ReDigi could avail itself of the “essential step defense,” on the theory that making intermediate copies of the music files was necessary for ReDigi to carry out its (assumed*)...
Good Contract > No Contract > Bad Contract (Part 2)
Drawing Lessons from ICG Link v. Steen In my Friday post, we looked at the facts and holding of the October 31, 2011 appellate decision in ICG Link v. Steen. Recall that both parties thought they had entered a contract for ICG Link to build Steen’s company, Nashville...
Good Contract > No Contract > Bad Contract (Part 2)
Drawing Lessons from ICG Link v. Steen In my Friday post, we looked at the facts and holding of the October 31, 2011 appellate decision in ICG Link v. Steen. Recall that both parties thought they had entered a contract for ICG Link to build Steen’s company, Nashville...
