Monthly Archives: December 2011

Friday’s Endnotes – 12/23/11

Terry Hart • December 23, 2011 • Posted in Friday's Endnotes • Comments closed

I’ll be taking a holiday break from blogging, so this will be the last post of 2011. A big thank you to all my readers for a great year. Small Copyright Claims Request for Comment — “The U.S. Copyright Office is undertaking a study at the request of Congress to assess whether and, if so, how [...]

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Ninth Circuit Rules on UMG v. Veoh

Terry Hart • December 21, 2011 • Posted in Copyright news • Comments closed

Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit held that video sharing site Veoh is immune from copyright liability under the DMCA in what will likely become a seminal ruling for copyright and the internet. Plaintiff Universal Music Group had asked the Circuit Court to reverse the lower court’s holding that Veoh qualified for the DMCA safe harbor on several [...]

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Copyright and the First Amendment: The Unexplored, Unbroken Historical Practice, Part 3

Terry Hart • December 19, 2011 • Posted in Copyright history • Comments closed

The question I’ve been asking in a series of recent posts is whether history can provide any insight into current claims that copyright law and the First Amendment conflict. As I noted, the Congress’s constitutional authority to secure exclusive rights to creators and the First Amendment’s prohibition on Congress making any laws abridging the freedom [...]

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Friday’s Endnotes – 12/16/11

Terry Hart • December 16, 2011 • Posted in Friday's Endnotes • Comments closed

Tomorrow is Beethoven’s birthday.1 The famous composer lived when copyright doctrine was still young. It had yet to become useful as legal protection for many composers, yet — little known fact — Beethoven was still concerned about piracy. Economist Frederic Scherer relates a couple stories about this concern in his paper The Emergence of Musical Copyright in Europe from [...]

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OPEN Act: Some Opening Thoughts

Terry Hart • December 12, 2011 • Posted in Copyright news • Comments closed

Senator Wyden, a vocal opponent of the PROTECT IP Act in the Senate and Stop Online Piracy Act in the House, has criticized the bills by saying that online piracy “is not an issue where we should use a bunker-buster bomb when a laser beam would do.” But does the OPEN Act, draft language of [...]

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Friday’s Endnotes – 12/09/11

Terry Hart • December 9, 2011 • Posted in Friday's Endnotes • Comments closed

OPEN Act (OPA) draft language released — The big news in the US this week was the public release of draft legislation for an alternative to SOPA and PROTECT IP. Thoughts? I’ll have a post on the language next week, most likely. The Mystery Man Behind Megaupload Piracy Fight — As I understand it, Megaupload [...]

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Copyright and the First Amendment: The Unexplored, Unbroken Historical Practice, Part 2

Terry Hart • December 8, 2011 • Posted in Copyright history • Comments closed

Last week I began writing about the unexplored history surrounding copyright law and the First Amendment. To sum up: in the past four decades, there has been a lot of scholarship concerning a potential conflict between the Copyright Clause of the US Constitution and the free speech and press protections of the First Amendment. Since [...]

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100 years of Copyright and Disruptive Technology

Terry Hart • December 5, 2011 • Posted in Copyright history • Comments closed

Last week I ran a post collecting a number of pieces that quoted John Philips Sousa and Jack Valenti. The argument in many of the sources (though not all) goes something like this: The content industry, the entertainment industry, the copyright industries — and by extension the artists, authors, and creators who make their living producing [...]

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Friday’s Endnotes – 12/02/11

Terry Hart • December 2, 2011 • Posted in Friday's Endnotes • Comments closed

2011 ABA Journal Blawg 100 — I am deeply honored to learn that this site has been selected as one of the top 100 law blogs of the year by the ABA Journal. From the description: “Terrence Hart’s Copyhype has rapidly established itself as one of the best copyright blogs on the Web,” writes Ben [...]

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