On May 11, 2022, the Fifth Circuit reinstated Texas state law HB 20 which allows private parties to sue tech platforms with 50M+ MAUs for their censorship of user-generated content based on “the viewpoint of a user or another person”. On May 13, technology lobbying groups NetChoice and the Computer...
Today Congress held hearings on the latest IP legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). We are taking part in American Censorship Day to help spread the word and stop this bill. We’ve outlined five of the most important problems with SOPA.
1. SOPA violates due process. Under SOPA, any private...
Representatives Anna Eshoo and Zoe Lofgren joined eight other members of Congress in urging the House Judiciary Committee to reject SOPA because it would cause "serious and long term damage to the technology industry" -- "one of the few bright spots in our economy."
Nine of the leading internet...
Last July, I signed on to a letter from more than 100 law professors urging Congress to reject the PROTECT-IP Act. A new version of that bill -- referred to as both the E-PARASITE Act and SOPA -- was introduced in the House last week, and it is even more dangerous than its predecessors. See David...
Last week, Google Books suffered another legal attack in the form of a class action, this time in Israel. I have been reading through the complaint and the class action motion this morning. Below my short description and initial assessment.
Plaintiff is the author and sole rights holder in a...
Quoted verbatim from a recent DMCA takedown letter:
IMPORTANT NOTICE: None of the information contained in this legal notice is to be transmitted and/or released to any third party, including but not limited to Chilling Effects (chillingeffects.org), without the express written permission of the the...
Valérie Laure Benabou, a law professor at the University of Versailles and an esteemed expert on French and international copyright law, kindly agreed to share her thoughts on the Google vs. SAIF case decided yesterday by the Paris Court of Appeals:
An important decision of the Paris Court of Appeal...
A court in Israel found that taking CC-licensed pictures from Flickr and publishing them in a book violated the copyright in each and every picture separately. (Source: www.law.co.il, including a link to the decision in Hebrew).
The facts are trivial: Plaintiffs, amateur photographers, uploaded...
If you have ever actually read through a software end user license agreement, you know that they are often full of restrictions on how you can use the software. Typically, the agreement states that the license to use the software is contingent upon compliance with all of those restrictions. If you...
On Monday we filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the Sony v. Tenenbaum case, pending in in the First Circuit Court of Appeals. Tenebaum was sued and found liable for copyright infringement for sharing 30 music files. The jury awarded the record label plaintiffs...
I’m late to the party, but I wanted to say a few things about the District Court’s decision in the Viacom v. YouTube case this week and. This will be a four-part post, covering:
1. The holding
2. The economic principle behind it
3. The next steps in the case
4. A review of the errors in legal...