Major Victory For Fair Use In Book Digitization Case. A major ruling from the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit was handed down on October 16 establishing Google’s program to digitize millions of books is legal under fair use. In a press release the Re:Create Coalition applauded the ruling and said, “This decision scores a major victory…

In June 2015, the Copyright Office released its report on Orphan Works and Mass Digitization.  When the report was released, ARL noted flaws with the report for both the orphan works legislation recommendation and the mass digitization/extended collective licensing pilot program proposal pointing out that libraries rely heavily on fair use.  The Library Copyright Alliance (LCA) also submitted a response to…

Project DisCo readers know that a number of our contributors have regularly posted on the subjects of copyright and fair use. Indeed, the topic is not only important, but one for which change is frequent and sometimes lurching. Nothing exemplifies that better than the shifting sands of copyright enforcement by major U.S. and international sports organizations, like the National Football…

Singer/songwriter John Fogerty’s new memoir Fortunate Son reminds us that the fiercest battles in the copyright area often are not between rights holders and users or technology platforms, but between artists and their distributors. As a recent review of the memoir in the Washington Post explains, the brief success of Fogerty’s band Creedence Clearwater Revival “teed up a lifetime of…

It appears the National Football League is cracking down on the unauthorized proliferation of GIFs and Vines of league-owned content. Sometimes these snippets are of funny incidents or for serious study of various facets of the game. Two of the biggest violators, Deadspin and SBNation, recently were suspended by Twitter for violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act after receiving takedown notices…

On October 16, 2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit unanimously affirmed the lower court’s fair use in Authors Guild v. Google, also known as the “Google Books” case. Google, through its Library Project, made digital copies of tens of millions of books submitted to it by libraries. It then included these copies in a search index…

  Today, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit unanimously found that the Google Books project, under which Google digitized, indexed, and permits users to search and view snippets of millions of printed books, constitutes a fair use. The following can be attributed to Raza Panjwani, Policy Counsel at Public Knowledge: “The circuit court’s decision is a…

NFL Shuts Down Deadspin And SB Nation Over GIFS. The NFL sent 18 takedown notices to Twitter this weekend regarding Deadspin’s alleged copyright violations while tweeting GIFS of NFL games. Meanwhile SB Nation’s Twitter account was similarly suspended for tweeting out GIFS of college football highlights. The NFL claimed exclusive rights to “intellectual property of the NFL and its Member…

Are lawyers the driving force behind artistic freedom? Astonishingly, that’s the impression you get when you read the Copyright Alliance’s account of a recent panel on music copyright hosted at George Mason University. To be clear, they note the importance of creators, in the sense that: Intellectual property drives economic and artistic freedom, thereby supporting a professional class of musicians…

Today the Copia Institute released a report entitled The Carrot or the Stick? Innovation vs. Anti-Piracy Enforcement.  The idea of evaluating carrots, or incentives, versus sticks, meaning penalties, in the context of IP enforcement is a subject frequently explored here at DisCo  [1] [2] [3].  In general, government policies tend to focus on sticks to the exclusion of carrots, even…