May 9, 2013
Let me begin with the bottom line: this was a excellent course. If Professor Fisher offered another course (such as trademark or Internet law, two areas identified on his online bio), I would not hesitate to take it or audit it. Background edX is a collaboration formed by Harvard and MIT to produce “Massive Online Open Courses,” or “MOOCs.” (I will use the phrase “online courses” as well as “MOOC”). edX is something of a latecomer to the still-new world of MOOCs. The leaders to date (with the most courses), are Coursera and Udacity. However, there are many “smaller” and legacy offerings. (See 700 Free Online Courses From Top Universities). My impression is that until edX, Coursera and Udacity arrived, most online courses were nothing more than hit-or-miss video recordings of classroom lectures. They were not produced with an online audience in mind, and often suffered from poor production quality. Listening to the professor discuss homework assignments, papers, exams, office hours and teaching assistants–none of which are relevant to viewing the lectures online–was frustrating. Until recently online courses tended to focus on the hard sciences, and I hadn’t come across any legal courses. This changed when, late last year, I received an edX email notice for “HLS1x Copyright.” Or, as it came to be known, “CopyrightX.” Here are some excerpts from the course description I received: HLS1x Copyright, an experimental…
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April 30, 2013
The recording companies have consistently maintained that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s (DMCA) notice-and-takedown regime does not apply to pre-1972 works. However, the law on this arcane issue has been scarce. In Capital Records v. MP3tunes (SDNY 2011), the court ruled that pre-1972 works were covered by the DMCA. After this decision the recording companies decided to make their argument in state court. Their strategy paid off – the New York State intermediate appellate court (the New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division), has issued a decision contrary to MP3tunes. In UMG Recordings v. Escape Media (often referred to as the Grooveshark* case), the court held that “Congress intended for the DMCA only to apply to post-1972 works.” *Grooveshark is a music streaming service that allows users to upload sound recordings. According to Wikipedia, Grooveshark streams over one billion sound files a month. The Grooveshark case arises out of two legal oddities: first, Congress did not extend copyright protection to “sound recording” until it passed the 1972 Copyright Act (the effective date of protection being February 15, 1972); and second, before 1972 copyright was subject to state law. The upshot of this is that although the federal courts have exclusive jurisdiction over most copyright law claims, pre-1972 sound recordings are an exception. Claims for breach of pre-1972 sound recordings can be brought in state court and decided under the antiquated state copyright laws.*…
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