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In FO©US
Copyright critics, particularly those voices murmuring in the halls of academia and legal scholarship, seem to question the purpose of copyright as though the law itself has generative properties. While it is true that copyright imposes one kind of constraint, and that constraints in general tend to be generative in the creative process, copyright’s critics focus a great deal of attention on the productive implication in the language of the Copyright Clause itself, meaning its purpose “to promote the useful arts and sciences.”
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Weekly copyright related summary of issues, congressional developments, judicial updates, administration updates, international updates and industry updates, provided courtesy of American Continental Group (ACG).
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October 20-26 marks Free Speech Week in the United States; a week in which organizations across the country hold events to commemorate an idea that is central to our beliefs. Coincidentally, 40 years ago today, former Register of Copyrights Barbara Ringer delivered her lecture “The Demonology of Copyright," where she discussed how copyright law supports our ideals of free speech.
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Last week, the Eleventh Circuit handed down a long-awaited decision in Cambridge v. Becker with important implications for fair use in the academic world. The majority opinion reversed the district court’s holding, which had previously concluded that 43 of 48 allegedly infringing uses were protected under the fair use doctrine. The case stems from the systematic and widespread copying by Georgia State University (GSU) of excerpts of works owned by three academic publishers: Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Sage Publications.
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Once again, copyright antagonists have aligned with claims to protect netizens from threats that don’t exist either in theory or in practice. On October 15, 2014, Wikileaks, for the second time, leaked a draft of the IP Chapter (dated May 14th) of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), spawning a flurry of blogs and editorials on the recurring theme that the TPP threatens individual user freedom, innovation, and speech by way of proposals to protect copyright for the 12 nations involved. These claims are not only misleading, they also fail to take into account the importance of robust international copyright protection for creators around the world.
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On October 15, 2014 Wikileaks leaked a draft version of the IP Chapter of the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), a free trade agreement currently under negotiation. This comprehensive treaty includes many issues relevant to trade such as IP. Shortly after the IP Chapter leak, several copyright antagonists quickly moved to criticize the provisions pertaining to ISP liability for copyright infringement. This post provides a legal analysis on why these assertions are misleading.
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