TAP guest blogger Professor Dan Nabel offers his list of the “Top 10” fair use cases from 2014.
Law professor Eric Goldman, Santa Clara High Tech Law Institute, explains the court’s ruling that a verb usage of a trademark doesn’t automatically undermine trademark protection.
Last month, the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology gathered together scholars, policymakers, and interested stakeholders to consider what changes would make the next copyright act truly great. Consensus has been building that the Copyright Act of 1976 needs an overhaul to better resolve the challenges posed by emergent technologies. A recap of “The Next Great Copyright Act” symposium is provided by Patrick Goold.
Professor Joshua Gans, Rotman School of Management, discusses the rise of the game 2048 very closely on the heels of a similar game called, Threes. He examines the desire by Threes’ creators for acknowledgment of their app development by those who follow with imitations.
Professor James Grimmelmann, University of Maryland, explains why he wrote an amicus brief (with David Post) arguing that Aereo should win its Supreme Court case. Aereo is a startup that lets users stream or record live broadcast TV content.
In their article “The Nature and Incidence of Software Piracy: Evidence from Windows,” Professors Susan Athey (Stanford) and Scott Stern (MIT) explore how consumers most commonly pirate software. The authors also looked into the impact of enforcement actions against popular pirating websites. This post summarizes their findings.
Law professor Eric Goldman, Santa Clara University, examines Judge Chin’s dismissal of the Authors Guild lawsuit against Google which claimed that the Googles Books project violates the copyright fair-use doctrine.
To commemorate the twenty-first anniversary of the landmark decision on copyright protection for software, Computer Associates v Altai, the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology hosted a day long roundtable discussion. “Altai @ 21: Software Copyrights Revisited” gathered leading academics and practitioners to discuss the decision’s legacy and the upcoming appellate decision in Oracle v Google.
Due to the growing importance of mobile devices, app stores are among the most powerful intermediaries in the Internet ecosystem. Last week, in an unprecedented ruling, a federal court held that an app store wasn’t liable for the third party apps it distributed. This highlights the significant restrictions facing the pro-regulatory folks who want to turn app store operators into Internet cops.
In his article for Wired magazine, Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain examines issues of censorship, content altering, and access restrictions that are unique to books in electronic formats.