Recent appellate decisions in the United States have recognized expanded grounds for personal jurisdiction in cases of internet-based copyright infringements; divided on the extent to which the three-year statute of limitations limits damage recoveries; and increased the occasions for motions to dismiss on the ground of fair use. Also, in a rebuff to claims of…
In its landmark 1994 decision Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569 (1994), the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruled that Campbell’s creation of a rap parody version of a popular Roy Orbison song could be fair use because it transformed the original song by adding something new, with a different purpose, or a new meaning…
In 2015, the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property (PIJIP) set out to conduct empirical research on the impact of copyright exceptions. We felt that there was a shortage of papers demonstrating the benefits of exceptions for users of protected works. We soon realized that information about the changes to copyright law over time…
In February 2019, Tamita Brown, Glen S. Chapman, and Jason T. Chapman (‘plaintiffs’) collectively filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Netflix, Amazon, and Apple (‘defendants’), claiming that the defendants had directly and indirectly infringed their copyright over the song “Fish Sticks n’ Tater Tots” by using it in their documentary titled ‘Burlesque’ (Brown v. Netflix, Inc.)….
This post is the second installment of a synopsis of the doctoral thesis the author defended at Universidade Católica Portuguesa on 25 September 2020. The thesis was recently published by Kluwer Law International, as part of its Information Law Series. The first part of this post has established the need to reform the InfoSoc framework…
This post is the first instalment of a synopsis of the doctoral thesis the author defended at Universidade Católica Portuguesa (Lisbon) on 25 September 2020. The thesis was recently published by Kluwer Law International, as part of its Information Law Series. Copyright exceptions fine-tune the reach of authors’ exclusive rights. They treat as non-infringing…
The decade-long titanic battle between Oracle and Google over whether copyright law forbids unlicensed reimplementations of parts of the Java Application Program Interface (API) in a smartphone platform is finally over. In a blockbuster opinion for a 6-2 majority for the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Stephen Breyer decisively supported Google’s fair use defense. The biggest…
There are not many surprises in the just released Copyright Office Section 512 Study. On virtually every issue about which the copyright industry had complained for the last two decades regarding the notice and takedown regime first established by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998, now codified in 17 U.S.C. § 512—from its…
In January 2018, Google filed a petition to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review two adverse rulings by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in the Oracle Am. Inc. v. Google Inc. case. The first was the Federal Circuit’s 2014 decision overturning a district court ruling that several thousand declarations that Google…
On 19 March 2018, the Department of Communications and the Arts released its Copyright Modernisation Consultation Paper (Consultation Paper) addressing key proposals for the reform (or rather “modernisation”) of Australia’s copyright laws and regulations. The Consultation Paper is the latest in a series of publications addressing copyright law reform in Australia, some of which were…
