Mass Law Blog

Mass Law Blog Update, Week Ending January 31, 2014

by | Jan 31, 2014

  • House hearings on copyright reform continue. January 28, 2014 focused on the scope of fair use. Paper submissions from the five panel members are collected here.
  • Harvard Law School professor William Fisher’s 2014 CopyrightX online course has begun. If you are not one of the 500 students selected to participated in the course, you can still audit the course. First week lecture is  on “The Foundations of Copyright Law.” CopyrightX
  • Prince’s N. D. Cal. lawsuit against “Doe” defendants who have created links to infringing material. The suit was withdrawn by the end of the week.
  • Court sets aside jury verdict finding copyright infringement of source code under “virtually identical” standard of comparison. Antonik v. Electronic Arts, N. D. Cal.
  • Audio recording of Swatch earnings classified as fair use, and therefore not copyright infringement. Swatch Group v. Bloomberg
  • Copyright owner sues YouTube following user-requested “put back” request. Would seem to be a meritless claim, since YouTube is following DMCA, and only proper defendant is the user.  Sicre v. YouTube
  • Evan Brown discusses a new CFAA case out of the the Norther District of Cal., hereEnki Corporation v. Freedman.
  • The 1%ers weren’t just shmoozing at Davos. They also generated a 26 page report titled “Norms and Values in Digital Media: Rethinking Intellectual Property in the Digital Age” (link) (OK, I know, their staffers back home wrote this)