Category: Copyright Law

With 2017 almost here, I have noticed people posting reminders to update the copyright notices on website footers. And while this is not “wrong,” it shows a common misconception of what copyright law is, what it does, and how it works. So, I thought this would be a good time to review copyright law in […]

Copyright infringement is serious business and a true violation is something that should be addressed as soon as possible. But what if it isn’t a true violation? What if it was a ploy to make money? And, whether true or a scheme, how would …

In the June 2016 decision of Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (2016), the Supreme Court held that in copyright cases, district courts should give “substantial weight” to the objective reasonableness of the losing party’s position when determining whether to award attorney’s fees. The Court vacated the Second Circuit’s ruling against awarding attorney’s fees […]

Virtual reality (VR) is a unique puzzle in copyright infringement because of its relative newness—at least, compared to other copyright-protected materials. Despite that, we have a pretty good idea of the technology’s potential, as anybody familiar with the Enterprise-D’s holodeck can testify to. A television show, book, or sculpture is presented to the viewer as […]

There is currently no federal law regulating the distribution of revenge porn, also known as nonconsensual pornography (NCP). The Cyber Civil Rights Initiative has created a model for what the federal government could eventually adopt. The model essentially lays out that if a person knowingly distributes sexually explicit material about another person, knowing they did […]

Chances are pretty high that if you have a Facebook account you’ve seen the ads for online clothing companies such as RoseGal, RoseWe, DressLily, SammyDress, and Choies. They have pictures of stunning dresses, swimsuits, sweaters, and other clothes, and their prices are incredibly low – often less than $20 for most items. Some people have […]

It took Michelangelo over four years to complete the Sistine Chapel—it might take you four seconds to download a high-resolution picture of it from Google. In 2016, Michelangelo may have been a starving artist. Fortunately for Michelangelo, and many other great Renaissance artists, the church and rich merchants were able to pay so much money […]

China has a strong system in place for ensuring the protection of copyrighted material, often resulting in almost immediate action. The Chinese copyright takedown policies are designed to protect the right of “communication through an information network.” This focuses on a right to make sound and audiovisual recordings available to the public over the Internet.

There are three types of intellectual property. They include: (1) trademark; (2) patent; and (3) copyright law. As discussed in Trade Dress Protection, “[a] trademark is a mechanism for identifying the source of a good or service and a technique for providing marketing advantages for the owner of the trademark.” Moreover, while a patent protects […]

Malibu Media, LLC has filed a new set of lawsuits against individual John Doe defendants in the Eastern District of Michigan. The cases were filed on March 12 and March 13, 2014 under the following case numbers:   1:2014-cv-00241 1:2014-cv-00242 1:2014-cv-00243 1:2014-cv-00244 1:2014-cv-00245 1:2014-cv-00246 1:2014-cv-00247 1:2014-cv-00248 1:2014-cv-00250 1:2014-cv-00251 1:2014-cv-00253 1:2014-cv-00255 1:2014-cv-00256 1:2014-cv-00258 1:2014-cv-00260 1:2014-cv-00261 1:2014-cv-00262 […]