BrookLawTalk - The UnOfficial blog of BLS

The Romantics (of "What I Like About You" fame) filed suit against the "Guitar Hero" maker, claiming the sound alike violates their right of publicity in the sense of imitating the sound of their voices. And they recently had their motion for a preliminary injunction denied:

http://williampatry.blogspot.com/2007/12/guitar-hero-rocks-on.html

An alternative or complementary approach to the Creative Commons efforts, by the group Public Knowledge, was discussed in a speech at Boston University by Gigi Sohn:

My premise is simple: copyright law has become out of touch with our technological reality to the detriment of creators and the public. Pre-VCR copyright policies must be transformed to embrace our new user generated culture. Today, I will give you my perspective on the current creative marketplace, and prescribe six policy changes to allow it to flourish.

Sun is responding to NetApp's allegations that ZFS infringes on their WAFL patents, by raising the stakes:

So later this week, we're going to use our defensive portfolio to respond to Network Appliance, filing a comprehensive reciprocal suit. As a part of this suit, we are requesting a permanent injunction to remove all of their filer products from the marketplace, and are examining the original NFS license - on which Network Appliance was started.

From Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog

Saying that copyright law has “become out of touch with our technological reality to the detriment of creators and the public,” Public Knowledge President Gigi B. Sohn unveiled a new program for copyright reform that will be more responsive to new innovations.

“Pre-VCR copyright policies must be transformed to embrace our new user-generated culture,” Sohn said in a speech to the New Media and the Marketplace of Ideas Conference at Boston University. A complete text of the speech is available at: http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/1244.

She added: “For the past 35 years, the trend has been nearly unmitigated expansion of the scope and duration of copyright, resulting in a clear mismatch between the technology and the law. Over the past decade copyright reformers like Public Knowledge have stopped the pendulum from swinging even farther away from digital reality. Now it is time to move the pendulum towards the future and away from the past.”

BLS Intellectual Property and Technology Association presents . . .

What: "Some Rights Reserved" - an introduction to Creative Commons Licenses

Who: With guest speaker, Fred Benenson, 2006 Creative Commons Cultural Fellow.

Where: Brooklyn Law School, 250 Joralemon, Room 503

When: Wednesday, Nov. 7, from 1-2PM. Lunch will be provided.

Join us in a casual lunch setting and learn about Creative Commons licenses. Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright - all rights reserved - and the public domain - no rights reserved. Creative Commons licenses protect copyright while inviting certain uses of work - a "some rights reserved" copyright. Fred Benenson will introduce the various CC licenses, as well as current legal challenges surrounding them. An opportunity for Q&A will follow.

For more information on Creative Commons, please visit:

From the Opinion:
Plaintiffs had challenged the recordkeeping requirements 18 U.S.C. § 2257 placed upon producers of images of “actual sexually explicit conduct” as violative of the First Amendment. We conclude that the statute is overbroad and therefore violates the First Amendment, and accordingly we reverse the district court’s judgment and remand with instructions to enter summary judgment for the plaintiffs.

6th Circuit Opinion

Not a single teacher interviewed for a recent study on copyright reported receiving any training on fair use.

Copyright confusion is running rampant in American schools, and not just among the students. The teachers don't know what the hell is going on, either, and media literacy is now being "compromised by unnecessary copyright restrictions and lack of understanding about copyright law."

The Cost of
Copyright Confusion
for Media Literacy

From ArsTechnica

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY & TECHNOLOGY ASSOCIATION
First General Meeting & Elections
THURSDAY, 1pm ROOM 604
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Apparently, Nixon Peabody commissioned a song for marketing purposes that goes a little something like, "Everyone's a Winner at Nixon Peabody." It was, of course, leaked and instantly became a hit in the blogosphere for being just plain weird. Instead of laughing along at their creation, Nixon Peabody lawyered up and sent a take-down notice to Youtube. Now it's an even bigger hit with bloggers!

AboveTheLaw has the whole story, and another Youtube video explains the saga and plays the song under Fair Use.