Copyright’s Substantial Confusion — Marquette University Law School professor Bruce Boyden begins a long journey examining the test for determining copyright infringement. The question (particularly when courts are confronted with nonverbatim copying of a work) has proven notoriously challenging, which is one reason why you can never get a straight answer from a copyright lawyer.
FairPlay copyright blocking proposal: my presentation at the Fordham IP conference — Anyone interested in getting up to speed on the current state of site blocking as a remedy for copyright infringement across the globe should check out Barry Sookman’s presentation from last week’s Fordham IP conference. It provides an overview of what countries have adopted site blocking, the different mechanisms used, and relevant court decisions and scholarly research on blocking. The presentation is a summary of a more comprehensive article by Sookman.
WHOIS Limits Under GDPR Will Make Pirates Harder to Catch, Groups Fear — “’We strongly assert that this model does not properly account for the critical public and legitimate interests served by maintaining a sufficient amount of data publicly available while respecting privacy interests of registrants by instituting a tiered or layered access system for the vast majority of personal data as defined by the GDPR,’†the groups write.”
Is an economy based on free incompatible with freedom? — Neil Turkewitz writes, “The potential of the Internet and other communications technologies to drive economic growth, prosperity and cultural production has been greatly undermined by distortions in the marketplace caused by the lack of adequate governance that allows companies to illegally traffic in what are essentially stolen goods. Many of those who profit from the status quo like to disguise their self-interest in rhetoric about free expression. It is long past time to end this dangerous charade. We are not serving free speech by making it harder for creators to earn a living from their original expression. Free societies can no longer tolerate the continued indifference to the rights of creators.”
How A Quiet Place Sound Designers Made Audiences Afraid of Their Own Noise — It’s easy to forget how important the craft of sound designers is to filmmaking, but their work is front and center in the recently released film A Quiet Place, a story built around the idea of making as little sound as possible.