Prof. James Gibson, University of Richmond School of Law September 15, 2011 The Digital Millennium Copyright Act has been around for more than a dozen years now. Some of its provisions were just weird, such as the one that established sui generis protection for boat hull designs. Others have had a skeptical reception in the [...]
FOR RELEASE: Aug. 31, 2011 Contact: Richard T. Kaplar The Media Institute 703-243-5700 Arlington, Va., Aug. 31, 2011 – Despite its informal slogan, “Don’t be evil,” Google has shown a willingness to exercise its dominant position in online search to the detriment of media companies, publishers, and journalists. Without some type of government intervention, [...]
Filed a white paper with the Federal Trade Commission stating that Google's dominance of the media economy could foreclose competition in key industry segments including media, search, online, and mobile. Google has shown a pattern of aggregating the content of others for its own gain and then foreclosing competitors from that same aggregated content, [...]
Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law* August 29, 2011 My previous column, “Internet Publication and U.S. Copyright Imperialism,” criticized a recent decision of a federal district court in Florida in Kernal Records OY v. Moseley, 2011 Dist. LEXIS 60666 (S.D. Fla. June 7, 2011), for ruling that a Norwegian composer’s work “published” [...]
Prof. Doug Lichtman, UCLA School of Law August 22, 2011 Google’s Android operating system is under siege. Oracle has a substantial patent and copyright case underway in which it alleges that Android is illegally derivative of the Sun programming language, Java. Apple has literally dozens of patent cases underway, alleging that Samsung, HTC, and Motorola [...]
Senator Mark Warner To Deliver Keynote Remarks at Oct. 18 Event FOR RELEASE: Aug. 18, 2011 Contact: Richard T. Kaplar The Media Institute 703-243-5700 Arlington, Va., Aug. 18, 2011 – The Media Institute will bestow awards on FCC Commissioner Robert M. McDowell and AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson at its annual Friends & Benefactors Awards [...]
Prof. Rodney A. Smolla, President, Furman University August 16, 2011 It is one thing to make news, and yet another to break it. The distinction between making and breaking news recently proved critical in a fascinating intellectual property case involving the rights of Internet news aggregators to scoop the stock trade recommendations of large financial [...]
Prof. Randal C. Picker, The University of Chicago Law School August 8, 2011 L. Frank Baum set out to create “a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out.” So said Baum writing in Chicago, in April 1900, in the introduction to his book [...]
Prof. Peter S. Menell, Director Berkeley Center for Law & Technology University of California at Berkeley School of Law July 26, 2011 In the 1989 sports drama, “Field of Dreams,” struggling Iowa corn farmer Ray Kinsella hears a whisper: “If you build it, he will come.” Rebelling against his father’s lack of spontaneity and following [...]
Prof. James Gibson, University of Richmond School of Law July 12, 2011 The recent agreement between big media companies and big Internet service providers (ISPs) concerning online copyright infringement has the law and technology world abuzz. ISPs like Comcast, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable have agreed to implement a system under which subscribers who repeatedly [...]