From the category archives:

Copyright

Podcast Interview of Professor Charles Nesson: Why Statutory Damages Under the Copyright Law are Unconstitutional in the Tenenbaum Case

April 7, 2009

As everyone in the copyright law community knows by now, Harvard Law School Professor Charles Nesson, and a team of HLS students, are defending Joel Tenenbaum in an RIAA action. Nesson’s primary argument is that the copyright statute’s statutory (aka punitive) damages of as much as $150,000 per infringement is unconstitutional, least as applied to

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First Circuit Reverses Judge Young in Situation Management Case

March 23, 2009

Are business training materials sufficiently original to be protected by copyright law? The answer, of course, is “it depends.” First and foremost it depends on the materials themselves, but it also depends on the judge. In Situation Management v. ASP, Massachusetts U.S. District Court Judge William Young thought the training materials created by the plaintiff,

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For the Want of a Nail the Kingdom was Lost – Failure to Get Clear Title to IP, Redux

February 11, 2009

In June 2007 I wrote a post discussing two cases in which clients of our firm had, before they became clients, failed to get written assignments of copyright ownership from independent contractors who wrote software for them. Without a written assignment the contractors were able to claim ownership of the works, and make life very

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Rambus Files Its Opposition to Cert.; Gatehouse/New York Times Copyright Case Settles

January 28, 2009

[Update: the FTC did file a reply brief.  Link here] All the briefs are in on the FTC petition for cert in its antitrust case against Rambus, (unless the FTC decides to file a reply brief, which is unlikely to change things much). I’ve added the Rambus opposition to the Rambus Group page on scribd.com,

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"Talkin 'Bout My [Internet] Generation" and Gatehouse Media says, "Give Us A Break Judge, the Registration is in the Mail"

January 16, 2009

Some interesting goings ons on the copyright front in D. Mass. are worth a brief mention. First, U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Gertner has ruled that proceedings in the RIAA’s case against Joel Tenenbaum, alleging illegal downloading, may be “webcast” by the Berkman Center. Whether the actual trial will be webcast is undecided as yet,

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Gatehouse Media v. The New York Times: Ready for Trial, Counsel?

January 6, 2009

When I discussed the copyright case Gatehouse Media v. The New York Times over the weekend I hadn’t reviewed the court docket, and hadn’t been aware that Judge William Young had pulled the trick that he is famous for (at least locally): when a party requests a preliminary injunction, he responds by ordering an expedited

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Massachusetts Federal District Court Presented With Lawsuit Involving Copying of Online Newspaper Headlines – Gatehouse Media v. The New York Times

January 3, 2009

An interesting copyright case has been filed in Federal District Court in Massachusetts. In Gatehouse Media v. The New York Times, Gatehouse Media contends that the Times has infringed its copyrights by copying the headlines and first sentences from Gatehouses’ local online newspapers, and displaying them verbatim on a Boston.com website (the New York Times

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Creative Commons Celebrates Its Sixth Anniversary

December 20, 2008

My partners Andy Updegrove, Peter Moldave and I attended this celebration of the sixth anniversary of Creative Commons at Harvard the evening of Friday, December 13, 2008. We could have waited a few days and watched the event on YouTube, but then we would have missed the cold weather, the greatest ice storm in modern

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"Excuse me, where is the Google Terminal?"

October 31, 2008

As expected, the proposed Google Book Search settlement has led to a lot of scrutiny, criticism and questions. Here is a link to the 125 page Settlement Agreement(without attachments; pdf). Here is a link to the page that holds the full agreement which, with attachments, is over 300 pages long). Both Larry Lessig (“IMHO, this

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