Rodney A. Smolla, President, Furman University April 16, 2013 A claim of copyright infringement that is deemed objectively unreasonable may occasionally result in the imposition of attorneys’ fees against the plaintiff alleging infringement. Section 505 of the Copyright Act allows a court to award the prevailing party a “reasonable attorney’s fee.”1 In SOFA Entertainment, Inc. [...]
Rodney A. Smolla, President, Furman University January 29, 2013 In Effie Film, LLC v. Pomerance,1 the court grappled with a fascinating intellectual property conflict involving the peculiar free expression values that are implicated when copyright interests intersect with historic facts in the context of history fiction. Eve Pomerance owned a copyright in two screenplays about [...]
Rodney A. Smolla, President, Furman University November 21, 2012 Courts have generally refused to superimpose on copyright law any additional free-standing layer of immunity emanating from the First Amendment for what would otherwise be considered copyright infringement. The reasoning has been that the substantive law of copyright already has doctrinal protections built in that provide [...]
Rodney A. Smolla, President, Furman University September 28, 2012 Imagine that a publicly traded company conducts an "Earnings Call," limiting those on the call to selected participants. The company itself records the call, but forbids those who phone in as participants from recording it for republication or broadcast. The company copyrights the recorded call. Despite [...]
Rodney A. Smolla, President, Furman University August 14, 2012 Intellectual property law functions against the larger backdrop of law and public policy surrounding freedom of speech and the free flow of information. This relationship is reflected in numerous legal doctrines and policies spanning all of intellectual property law, doctrines, and policies that mediate between information [...]
Rodney A. Smolla, President, Furman University April 30, 2012 The Supreme Court in Golan v. Holder1 upheld Section 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA),2 which granted copyright protection to preexisting works of Berne Convention member countries, protected in their country of origin, but lacking protection in the United States. The Court in Golan [...]
Rodney A. Smolla, President, Furman University March 20, 2012 How do assertions that the government possesses legally enforceable intellectual property interests that allow it to control and license access to governmentally sponsored entertainment and athletic events square with the First Amendment? In a prior IP Viewpoints post on this site, I argued that the United [...]
Rodney A. Smolla, President, Furman University January 30, 2012 In Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association v. Gannett Co., Inc.,1 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit rejected a claim by Gannett that its newspapers had a First Amendment right to broadcast high school athletic games, despite an exclusive licensing agreement that had licensed broadcast [...]
Rodney A. Smolla, President, Furman University November 21, 2011 A recent “ABC News” broadcast focused on the huge threat posed to the adult film industry by the proliferation of Internet sites distributing free pornography. To those who might wish the adult film industry good riddance, the battle between professional porn producers and free porn sites [...]
Rodney A. Smolla, President, Furman University October 12, 2011 In Perfect 10, Inc. v. Google, Inc.,1. the Internet search engine giant Google managed to score a victory against a company known as “Perfect 10,” a company that created and copyrighted photographic images of nude models for commercial distribution. Perfect 10 originally featured the nude photos [...]