Month: August 2011

Q: What does this NSFW video have to do with Entertainment Law, specifically copyright and an expedited example of fair use? *And how’s your sense of humor on an August Friday? A: Click here   Canada on Strike Tags: SOUTH...

A metaphor packs only as much power as it clarifies and makes more real and concrete an abstraction. So hold on to your hats, those of you whose minds get blown in the gusts of technology and its fanciful descriptions. Ready: A U.S. District judge in Manhattan says that, for the most part, companies that run musical locker services in the cloud act as neutral service providers, and, as such, are entitled to safe harbor protections in the Digital Copyright Milennium Act. Got that, Google and Amazon fans? The specifics of this case concern MP3tunes, its tech innovation guru founder Michael Robertson and the actions of its customers, most of whom legally uploaded music into storage spaces (those “lockers”) in the online area known as the “cloud,” aka on giant servers owned by others rather than on personal computers. Since MP3, if notified, would pull links from customers’ illegally downloaded materials( but not those files themselves), since the firm did not itself illegally upload others’ tunes and since it mostly provided just the storage service, the company largely deserved protections from copyright infringment actions, including one filed by music publisher EMI, said Judge William Pauley. While some analysts see the Tuesday decision as a boon for the likes of Google and Amazon — both of which launched “cloud”-based music storage services and did so without attempting, as subscription outfits like...

The summer and the sort-of-vacation at Southwestern officially ends at the law school Monday morning, as the Class of 2014 descends on campus and gets to business. To all the newcomers, Welcome, 1Ls, and don’t forget to read our blog regularly and to join us on Facebook and Twitter (@Biedermanblog). So this isn’t just the Department of Shameless Self-Promotion, a couple of updates on items previously noted on the blog: THR Esq informs that the legal battling between the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. and Dick Clark Productions will result in a September hearing before a U.S. District judge — not before a jury. The scribes see the trial phase of the case, viewed as the more key, as it will determine the fate of the January, 2012, Golden Globes telecast, taking eight days instead of roughly three weeks were jurors involved. Here’s an earlier post from the blog detailing this dispute. The Supremes almost sneaked away for the summer before handing down several key decisions, including the much-awaited ruling that tossed California’s attempt to bar the sale to minors of video games deemed excessively violent. The case generated considerable attention stateside but our British and Continental pals greeted the whole issue with not much more than a pish-posh and a yawn, according to an intriguing post at Gamer/Law. A running lawsuit involving the family of comic book legend Jack...