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
Music, Copyright and the Performing Rights Organizations
With some exceptions, every public venue that plays popular music for its customers - concert venue, bar, restaurant, shopping mall or health club - needs to enter into a blanket license agreement with ASCAP, BMI and SESAC, the performing rights organizations (PROs) that pay public performance royalties to songwriters and publishers. Occasionally a club will fail to join a PRO, ignore warnings and be sued for copyright infringement. Here’s a current example in which a club did sign a license...
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...
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