Some people are cheering and some people are shrugging in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision last week in Star Athletica v. Varsity Brands.[1] The Court held that designs for Varsity Brands’ cheerleading uniforms may be protected as copyrighted works against unauthorized copying by its upstart rival, Star Athletica.Read More »Two Cheers for Copyright
Digesting the fair use reading in The Authors Guild v. Google in the Second Circuit, I went back to some… Read More »Fair Use and Google: Ten Years After
Are there tensions in recent fair use cases regarding methods? Fair use analysis has traditionally and conventionally posed a set of very “work-specific,” nuanced questions. For at least 15 years or so, since the rise of the original Napster technology (and really, at least since “librarying” was at issue in the original Betamax litigation), social practices and information technologies have raised the question of large-scale alleged fair uses. Yet copyright law sticks somewhat stubbornly to the “work-specific” legal framework. Are cracks appearing in that facade? Have recent cases opened that conversation in earnest?Read More »Working Fair Use
This report — “Abbott & Costello Heirs Sue Over Lifting of ‘Who’s on First’ Routine” by @HandtoGodBway — reminded me… Read More »Abbott and Costello, Copyright, and Me
People with a taste for the finer details of copyright law pay attention to the language in notices of claimed… Read More »Changing Rhetorics of Copyright