YouTube, Grouper, Bolt: What do these companies have in common? A lot of hot air about the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Copyright Act, also known as the “DMCA”. Speficially, the safe harbor as found in Section 512 of the Copyright Act. Most people think that the safe harbor provides protection for a website […]

There is a lot of speculation about why YouTube hasn’t been sued yet. I think the reason that YouTube hasn’t been sued yet was because they started early trying to make deals with the major labels and generally trying to make nice with the big players. Where YouTube (and, frankly, Google and other online companies) […]

In the words of Guy Forsyth, “Americans are freedom loving people and nothing says freedom like getting away with it.” The fact that is often lost in faculty dining room debate is that YouTube is a copyright infringement machine. This is a fact that is not lost on copyright owners whose works are infringed. Now […]

“Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends… Step inside! Hello! We’ve the most amazing show, you’ll enjoy it all we know, Step inside! Step inside! We’ve got thrills and shocks, supersonic fighting cocks… Roll up! Roll up! Roll up!See the show!” “Welcome Back My Friends to the Show that Never Ends” written […]

I think Mark Cuban is a funny guy, and he also happens to get it right occasionally. In a recent statement to an advertising group, Cuban said, essentially, that anyone who paid a stupid multiple for YouTube was stupid. A “moron”, actually, because YouTube was going to be sued out of existence and the fact […]

Maybe I live under a rock, but I didn’t know about the latest in the industry’s game of intolerance one-upsmanship in the case of Transworld and the Scissor Sisters that I read about on Steph Wills’ blog. I actually don’t care if its abuse of power, media consolidation, hatemongering, or whatever–it’s just uncool to retaliate […]

Tim Lee and I had an exchange on his Technology Liberation Front blog that I thought might be instructive on a topic we’ve dealt with before both here and on Kings of A&R: Avoiding unknowing grants under the Creative Commons license. You remember Creative Commons: Professor Lessig and his acolytes who “changed the way we […]