Mass Law Blog
Intellectual property and business litigation, Massachusetts and nationallyWritten by humans
Lee Gesmer’s Mass Law Blog began in 2005, and contains almost 600 posts. The site initially focused on Massachusetts law, but today it follows business and intellectual property law nation-wide. The site is hosted by Gesmer Updegrove LLP, a law firm based in Boston, Massachusetts. The firm represents startup and established companies in the areas of litigation, transactions (including financings, mergers and acquisitions), IP rights, taxation, employment law, standards consortia, business counseling and open source development projects and foundations. You can find a summary of the firm’s services here. To learn how Gesmer Updegrove can help you, contact: Lee Gesmer
What You Need To Know About Goldsmith v. Warhol and Fair Use
The doctrine of fair use has been called, with some justification, the most troublesome in the whole law of copyright. Justice Blackmun. Sony v. Universal (1984) Fair use in America simply means the right to hire a lawyer. Larry Lessig Fair use is the great white whale of American copyright law. Enthralling, enigmatic, protean, it endlessly fascinates us even as it defeats our every attempt to subdue it. Prof. Paul Goldstein ********* The photo of Prince directly below was...
LinkedIn Cannot Use the CFAA To Stop Scraping of Its Public Facing Web Data
One of the enduring mysteries of Internet law is the legality of "web scraping." Although scraping is invisible to most users it pervades the Internet and constitutes a substantial volume of all Internet traffic. Here are two examples of scraping: (1) Clearview AI has scraped billions of publicly available images from social media platforms and compiled them into a facial recognition database that it’s made available to law-enforcement and private industry. (2) hiQ Labs has scraped publicly...
Is “Photo Embedding” Copyright Infringement? It Depends on the Court
If you own or manage a website you may be familiar with the process of “photo embedding” or “inline linking” an image or video on your site. Rather than hosting the image file on your own server you retrieve the image from another Internet site and embed the content as part of your webpage’s overall display. Users can’t tell the difference, but as a technical (and legal) matter you never “copy” the image to your server. This practice is common, and has been performed millions of times on...
When Does a Copyright Expire?
The scope of copyright law is vast - it protects traditional art forms such as books, music, photos and paintings, but also covers more exotic forms of expression, such as computer software, choreography, literary and movie characters (Batman, James Bond) and even useful objects (product and clothing designs). However, it can be difficult to determine whether a particular work is protected by copyright due to the passage of time or failure to comply with once-essential "formalities." Many...
This site is hosted by Gesmer Updegrove LLP, a technology law firm based in Boston, Massachusetts. You can find a summary of our services here. To learn how GU can help you, contact:
Lee Gesmer