Above, a new clip from the forthcoming documentary Unsound looks at the difference between the cost of free and the price of free.
Piracy, Copyright & Censorship: A Call for Clarity — October 17 marks the beginning of Free Speech Week. In this article, John Degen disputes the too-common conflation of copyright and censorship. “Copyright law as constructed is not about stopping expression; it’s about encouraging and protecting it.”
Second Circuit Brings Some Sanity Back to Transformative Fair Use — Who’s on First? Devlin Hartline analyzes Tuesday’s Second Circuit opinion in TCA Television Corp v McCollum, a copyright dispute involving the famous Abbott and Costello routine. The panel found the incorporation of large parts of the routine into a dramatic play was not a transformative fair use, despite the trend of increasingly expansive fair use decisions in that circuit. (The motion to dismiss was, however, affirmed on alternate grounds since the court held the plaintiffs lacked ownership of the copyright at issue).
Choice of Law and Copyright Ownership — Pamela Chestak of Property, Intangible takes a look at the recent decision in RCTV Int’l v Rosenfeld, concerning ownership of the copyright in the Venezuelan telenovela, Juana La Virgen (a US version of the show, Jane the Virgin, airs on the CW). Chestak writes, “What I like about the decision is that the court very carefully parses out each step of the creation and ownership of the works, deciding at each step of the way what law applies, US or Venezuelan. As the court describes, the various cases in which foreign law is implicated have generally conflated the legal analysis. No conflation here.”
How to Memorize Scripts — Writer, director, and producer Ken Levine asked a bunch of actors: how do you remember all your lines? What follows here and in part 2 are responses from ten actors discussing their various approaches.