In this episode of The Briefing by the IP Law Blog, Scott Hervey and Josh Escovedo discuss the Ninth Circuit Ruling on the copyright aspects of Dr. Seuss “mashups.” In the second episode of this two-part series, they discuss the trademark aspects of this case.
Continue Reading The Briefing by the IP Law Blog: Dr Seuss Sets Photon Torpedoes on Star Trek Mashup in 9th Circuit Appeal (Part One, Copyright)
In this week’s episode of the Briefing by the IP Law Blog, Scott Hervey and Josh Escovedo discuss recent news stories reporting that police officers played copyrighted music during filmed encounters, ostensibly to keep the videos from being uploaded to the Internet. Scott and Josh discuss how copyright law, the DMCA, and fair use apply to this tactic.
Continue Reading The Briefing by the IP Law Blog: Can Copyrighted Music Keep Vids of Police Encounters Off The Internet?
Over the past few weeks, there have been a number of news articles and stories about police officers playing popular music during a citizen/officer interaction that is being filmed by the citizen. For example, Vice reported on a Beverly Hills police officer breaking out his phone and playing over a minute of Sublime’s “Santeria” when the officer discovered that his interaction with a well-known LA-area activist was being live-streamed by the citizen via Instagram. Similarly, Mashable reported that an Alameda County Sheriff’s deputy played a Taylor Swift song during an encounter. Why is this happening? There seems to be a belief that police service, when paired with a musical interlude, will prevent a recording of the interaction from being posted on social media due to algorithms that detect and remove videos incorporating copyrighted music (among other types of content).
Continue Reading Don’t Film So Close To Me: Can Copyrighted Music Keep Vids of Police Encounters Off The Internet?
In this week’s episode of The Briefing from the IP Law Blog, Josh Escovedo and Scott Hervey discuss an update to the litigation over Andy Warhol’s series of portraits of the artist Prince (Andy Warhol Foundation v Goldsmith). They provide a recap of last week’s episode, which covers the Second Circuit decision in favor of Goldsmith, the photographer whose image Warhol used to create the Prince Portraits, and the holding that Warhol’s renditions were not transformative enough to be fair use. That decision overturned a lower court decision in favor of the Warhol Foundation.
Continue Reading The Briefing by the IP Law Blog: Andy Warhol’s Prince Prints – Not Fair Use!? (Part Two)
Finding Google’s copying a fair use, the Supreme Court ended Oracle’s decade-long attempt to recover copyright damages. The battle began between these tech giants when Google designed its Android software platform for mobile devices, such as smartphones. The platform allows “computer programmers to develop new programs and applications” for Android-based devices. In designing the mobile platform, Google independently developed most of the code but copied what the parties referred to as “declaring code” for 37 application programming interfaces, or APIs. The declaring code in APIs “enables a set of shortcuts for programmers.” A programmer can select a particular task from the API’s task library without having to learn anything more than a simple command, thus allowing the programmer to use a library of prewritten code to carry out complex tasks without having to write the code from scratch.
At the time Google was developing the Android platform, many software developers were using Sun Microsystems’ Java programming language and its popular Java SE platform. Oracle, shortly after acquiring Sun Microsystems in 2010, accused Google of taking critical portions of the APIs in the Java code for unauthorized use in its Android platform. While Google independently developed the underlying code for the tasks, Google copied the declaring code for certain tasks “useful to programmers working on applications for mobile devices.” “Without that copying, programmers would need to learn an entirely new system to call up the same tasks.” With the “structure, sequence, and organization” of the APIs so similar, Oracle alleged Google infringed its copyrights.
Continue Reading Fair Use Shields Google in Its Copyright Battle with Oracle
