Certain state law personal rights, including misappropriation of someone’s likeness or identity, are preempted by federal copyright law.  For example, the right of an individual to prevent a third party from exploiting that person’s image or voice is trumped when that third party purchased the rights to the sound recordings (i.e. the copyright) of that [...]

I wrote last week about the proliferation of the law of libel on the internet, but the same explosion of opportunities for litigation – and risks to would-be publishers – applies via the internet to all forms of speech.  Libel is still libel, but more cases are pushing arguments that speech is conduct that can [...]

I recently wrote about the dust-up following the awarding of a Pulitzer for political commentary to online cartoonist Mark Fiore, when it was revealed that Apple had rejected Fiore’s proposed iPhone App several months before Fiore’s Pulitzer fame.  As had been widely reported, Apple subsequently invited Fiore to re-apply, which Fiore promptly did and now, [...]

Eric Felten brilliantly skewers the supposed credibility of the online “marketplace of ideas” when he recently wrote last week in the Wall Street Journal: Spend any time on the Internet and – like the naif in the ‘Casablanca’ gambling room dumbfounded when the wheel comes up 22-black twice in a row – one’s bound to [...]

Trumpets Ryan Chittum in the Columbia Journalism Review, “Yes, this is that serious. [The news media] needs to wrest back control of its speech from Apple Inc.  It’s easy to do it now while the press has leverage over Apple.  If the iPad becomes a significant driver of media revenue, and Apple decides to crack [...]

I will be moderating 2 separate panels on Monday and Tuesday at the 2010 Politics Online conference spectacular here in Washington. The first will be Monday April 19th at 2pm, and called “Is this Barack Obama’s Real Facebook Page? Domains, Twitter Handles, Online Presence – real or fake? Intellectual Property, Cyber Identity, and More!”.  I will be joined [...]

NPR’s Lynn Neary reported last week on the value of e-books (“No Ink, No Paper: What’s The Value Of An E-Book?”), illuminating the nuance about pricing of electronic books. Because books – electronic or otherwise – are still almost entirely issued by old-line publishing houses under the same decades-old operational model, a publisher’s cost of operations still has to be recouped. And for publishers, the sole source of that recoupment remains the consumer purchaser of a book, regardless of the medium of a book’s distribution or purchase or presentation. From this perspective, a more alarming (from the publishing industry’s perspective) competitive threat on the market today is the low-cost pricing of hardcover books (including current bestsellers) at places like Target, Costco and Walmart.

Can college and university teachers take their course materials, presentations, notes, slides, PowerPoints, syllabi and other teaching resources with them when they leave their current positions?  Can they sell or license these materials to online universities or market them through Amazon? For a group that tends to dispute everything even a position that would presumably [...]

“Work Made For Hire”, 17 USC §101: An original, copyright-able work (meaning: a work that falls within the subject matter of copyright protection) qualifies as a “work made for hire” if the work either (1) is created by an employee within the scope of his or her employment or (2) qualifies as “work made for [...]

Sherlock Holmes is still under copyright, even though his author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died almost 80 years ago.  Actually, some of Conan Doyle’s stories are or appear to be under copyright protection in the United States (not in the UK and not elsewhere), by virtue of an oddity in US copyright laws.  Ordinarily, US [...]