TLDR: Across the country, small- and medium-sized companies rely on and benefit from balanced and certain intellectual property (IP) laws to innovate and build better businesses. That’s why this week’s celebration of World Intellectual Property Day provides a timely opportunity for U.S. policymakers to better appreciate the importance of such balance and certainty when crafting policy that applies to the emerging…

As part of the Copyright Office’s efforts to implement the CASE Act, it has asked for feedback on how to operate the “Copyright Claims Board” (CCB) and how it should try to prevent abuse of the system. The Center for Democracy and Technology joins Public Knowledge, Re:Create, the R Street Institute, and the Organization for Transformative Works in comments urging the…

SCOTUS Opinion Highlights The Importance Of Fair Use To Benefit The Public. Re:Create compiled key portions of the U.S Supreme Court’s majority opinion in the Google v. Oracle decision to demonstrate fair use’s importance in benefiting the public. Justice Breyer emphasized copyright law’s purpose to encourage innovation and promote creativity — not to create a “special reward.” Viral Video Helps…

Justice Stephen Breyer’s majority opinion highlights the importance of Fair Use to benefit the public, which is the key purpose of copyright law. See below for key findings from the opinion, illustrated by quotes from Breyer’s opinion. The purpose of copyright law is to encourage more innovation, not create a “special reward.” Breyer: “Copyright statutes and case law have made…

Supreme Court Underscores How Fair Use Promotes Creativity. Contrary to what some rightsholders claim, fair use actually promotes creativity, as Jonathan Band explains in his latest Project Disco blog on the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Google v Oracle fair use case. Band points to Justice Breyer’s comments that fair use is an “‘equitable rule of reason’ that ‘permits courts…

In policy discussions, rightsholders often claim that the fair use right, 17 U.S.C. § 107, undermines the incentive to create new works. The U.S. Supreme Court’s April 5, 2021 decision in Google v. Oracle, however, underscores how fair use actually promotes creativity.  The Court restates the principle that fair use is an “‘equitable rule of reason’ that ‘permits courts to avoid rigid application of the copyright…

Supreme Court Hands Down Decisive Fair Use Victory. The U.S. Supreme Court issued a decisive victory for fair use in its 6-2 ruling in the Google v Oracle case this week. Writing the majority opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote: “To the extent that Google used parts of the Sun Java API to create a new platform that could be readily…

The software industry issued a collective sigh of relief after this week’s Supreme Court decision in Google v. Oracle finding that fair use allowed Google’s reimplementation in Android of Java declaring code. The Supreme Court’s first fair use decision in over 25 years and first software copyright opinion ever no doubt will be carefully studied by law professors and copyright practitioners alike….

TLDR: A Supreme Court decision yesterday means that startups and developers should be able to continue to use software interfaces, known as application programming interfaces (APIs), without facing liability for copyright infringement. Startups and developers routinely rely on APIs to create interoperability and compatibility between computer programs, and they had long understood APIs to be exempt from copyright protection. But a…

I’m happy about the Supreme Court’s 6-2 decision in Google v. Oracle, affirming that Google’s reimplementation of the Java API for Android was a fair use and thus not copyright infringement. Google and Oracle’s competitions can breathe a sigh of relief, since a result that went the other way could have seriously inhibited the ability of smaller companies and new entrants…