Monthly Archives: October 2010

Copyright: Its Law and Literature, by R.R. Bowker

Terry Hart • October 29, 2010 • Posted in Copyright history • Comments closed

The following is an excerpt from Copyright: Its Law and Literature, written by Richard Rogers Bowker. Published in book form in 1886 (it was first published as a series of articles in Publishers’ Weekly the year before), the book was, according to the preface by Bowker, “an attempt to give in brief and simple shape [...]

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Lawyers and the Art of Puzzling and Confounding

Terry Hart • October 27, 2010 • Posted in General • Comments closed

Water is wet, fire is hot, and people hate lawyers. None of these statements are noteworthy enough to even bear repeating. You probably couldn’t walk down the street without running into someone who is willing to share their distaste with the legal profession. And this distaste is nothing new. You can find examples of it [...]

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Misunderstanding DMCA

Terry Hart • October 25, 2010 • Posted in Secondary liability • Comments closed

Within the past 15 or so years, we’ve seen a large number of cases and laws addressing the issue of indirect liability — also referred to as secondary liability or third-party liability — for copyright infringement online. In 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, providing conditional safe harbors for online service providers. There’s also [...]

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EMI Records v. UPC

Terry Hart • October 18, 2010 • Posted in Copyright news • Comments closed

On October 11, The Irish High Court ruled that it did not have the authority to order Irish internet service provider UPC to implement a graduated response solution – a so-called “three strikes” approach – to reduce online piracy. The four major record labels – Warner Music, Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, and EMI – [...]

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Should Copyright be Treated Like Property?

Terry Hart • October 13, 2010 • Posted in Copyright reform • Comments closed

Many critics of current copyright doctrine believe its problems stem largely from an infusion of “property talk” into policy discussions. William Patry writes in Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, “By describing copyright as a private property right, proponents of the description hope to get policy makers and courts to believe that only private, and [...]

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Is Copyright Infringement Theft? Part 2

Terry Hart • October 11, 2010 • Posted in Copyright Criticism • Comments closed

“They make me madder than a yak in heat.” – Marge Simpson A little over a month ago, I wrote a post titled Is Copyright Infringement Theft? The post sparked several other thoughtful articles and many comments – most notably a response by Mike Masnick at the popular TechDirt blog, Why It’s Important Not to [...]

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Fall of File-Sharing

Terry Hart • October 5, 2010 • Posted in Copyright news • Comments closed

Update: the title of this post refers to the season (as in “the summer of savings!”). I inexplicably hadn’t thought of the more common meaning of ‘fall’ when I wrote it (d’oh!), and this post is not meant to imply that I think file-sharing is going away anytime soon. This is the fall of file-sharing. [...]

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Does Length Matter

Terry Hart • October 4, 2010 • Posted in Copyright reform • Comments closed

Copyright protection vests automatically when a work is created and currently lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years. The duration of copyright protection is frequently cited as one of the major problems in current law – one critic says “copyright protection lasts absurdly long,” a not uncommon view.1 Most commonly, arguments against [...]

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COICA Doodle Doom

Terry Hart • October 1, 2010 • Posted in Copyright reform • Comments closed

Proposed anti-piracy legislation is currently making its way through Congress and causing quite a stir online. Called the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA), the bill, like nearly every proposed IP legislation in the last decade, will, according to its opponents, surely result in a 1984-style government where all of our rights are harshly [...]

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