On April 29, 2016, the Australian Productivity Commission issued a nearly 600 page draft report on Intellectual Property Arrangements recommending a number of positive changes to provide better balance to the intellectual property system, including recommendations on fair use, shorter copyright terms, and specifying that copyright licensing does not override limitations and exceptions for libraries and archives. In the overview, while…

At the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive panel “Copyright & Creators 2026” on Friday, March 11, policy experts–including a fanworks leader, social justice advocate, futurist and veteran reporter–debated the trajectory of copyright law over the next decade. Organized by the Re:Create Coalition, the panelists took on copyright law’s impact on consumers, fans, digital entrepreneurs, and underprivileged communities today and discussed…

Chairman Goodlatte Pledges Commitment To Overhaul Copyright System. Speaking at a World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) event in accordance with World Intellectual Property Day, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Rep. Bob Goodlatte, addressed the audience in a pre-taped video on April 26, pledging to overhaul the copyright system. Summarizing the committee’s work in the past three years Chairman Goodlatte reflected…

  In my almost three years at Public Knowledge, I have never been so delighted as this morning when I saw an amicus curiae brief in the lawsuit over copyright in the constructed language Klingon – which opens by quoting a Klingon proverb, in Klingon script. Copyright in languages is something that has fascinated and troubled me for a long…

Supreme Court Supports Google Books As Fair Use That Benefits Public Knowledge. On April 18, the Supreme Court denied appeal to the unanimous federal appeals panel decision that Google Books is legal under fair use. Hailing the decision, the Executive Director of the Re:Create Coalition said “Our copyright laws were established to help expand access to information, and today the…

If you felt a vibration in the air this morning, it may have been the final sigh of relief so many of us heaved when the U.S. Supreme Court announced it will not review last fall’s expansive, pro-fair-use appellate court decision in the Google Books case. (Here’s The New York Times‘ account.) Now, law professors will tell you that when…

  Today, the United States Supreme Court denied cert in the long-running Google Books case, Authors Guild, et al. v. Google, Inc., letting stand the Second Circuit’s landmark decision that digitizing, indexing, and displaying snippets of print books in internet search results constitute a fair use under copyright law. The following can be attributed to Raza Panjwani, Policy Counsel at…

  Did you hear the one about the new technology that was going to run amok, squashing creativity, gobbling up every copyrighted work in its path, and redistributing it for free to all of the masses until nothing remained but scorched earth and abandoned studios across Hollywood? Me too. About 9,000 times. The latest iteration is an alarmist piece by…

Nonprofit Seeks To Bring “We Shall Overcome” To Public Domain. The We Shall Overcome Foundation, a nonprofit serving orphans and the poor, filed a motion on April 12 seeking a declaratory judgement that the iconic civil rights movement song “We Shall Overcome” is not under copyright and belongs in the public domain. The New York Times reports in ‘We Shall…

Last week the Internet achieved a small, but nevertheless important, victory in Luxembourg. Hyperlinking should be kept from the scope of copyright protection as far as possible — that was the key message in the opinion of Advocate General (AG) Wathelet in the GS Media case which is currently pending in front of the Court of Justice of the EU…