Check out the great user generated content on YouTube: Farting in Public. No wonder they want the Viacom material. Here’s the strong comeback from Google’s legal team per their letter to the Washington Post: Viacom’s lawsuit is an attack on the way people communicate on the Web and on the platforms that allow people to […]

Professor Lessig is at it again in a New York Times op-ed, bashing at copyright plaintiffs who take their cases to court in a rather hard to follow line of psuedo-argumentation: “Drawing upon common law-like power, the court expanded the Copyright Act in the Grokster case to cover a form of liability it had never […]

Press coverage of Viacom’s lawsuit against Google over its YouTube subsidiary tends to focus on the startling $1 billion minimum copyright infringement claim. The more interesting request of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York is for “…a declaration that Defendants’ conduct willfully infringes Plaintiffs’ copyrights, [and] a permanent injunction […]

Today was panel day at SXSW—I was on three panels in one day, which was a record. We were honored to have Marybeth Peters, Register of Copyright of the United States, participate in the panel I moderated with Ali Aydar, Rick Carnes, Jay Faires, Rebecca Greenberg and Patrick Ross. The panel was entitled “Can Art […]

Google’s Grand Poobah Eric Schmidt was recently quoted in the Wall Street Journal as telling the creative community to “prove it” when he was told in negotiations that content has “intrinsic value”. Now I have to remind myself that Eric Schmidt was supposedly brought to Google for the famous “adult supervision”, because he certainly had […]

e·vil –adjective1. morally wrong or bad; immoral; wicked: evil deeds; an evil life. 2. harmful; injurious: evil laws. 3. characterized or accompanied by misfortune or suffering; unfortunate; disastrous: to be fallen on evil days. 4. due to actual or imputed bad conduct or character: an evil reputation. 5. marked by anger, irritability, irascibility, etc.: He […]