University of Michigan Law School
Law 633

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Required Texts:

• Julie E. Cohen, Lydia Pallas Loren, Ruth Gana Okediji & Maureen A, O'Rourke, COPYRIGHT IN A GLOBAL INFORMATION ECONOMY (2d edition 2006) with 2008 Case and Statutory Supplement
• The authors of your Casebook maintain a website keyed to the book at www.coolcopyright.com, with useful resources and updates.

Copyright reference sources on the Internet:

Here is a modest collection of additional reference sources available on the World Wide Web. Each of them includes links to further sources, some of which are more reliable than others. Don't believe everything you read.
• The copyright statute: Title 17 of the US Code (current as of January 2007)
• United States Copyright Office homepage
  • Including another copy of the copyright statute (current as of October, 2007) and recently enacted amendments
• U.S. Department of Justice Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section
• Stanford University Library Copyright & Fair Use Site
• Copyright Society of the U.S.A.
• Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute Copyright Law collection
• Columbia Law Library Music Plagiarism Project collection of MIDI files, MP3 files and partial scores from songs involved in infringment cases
• Columbia Law School's KeepYourCopyrights.org resource for creators
• Professor Laura Gassaway's Chart: "When Works Pass Into the Public Domain"
• Terry J. Carroll's 2002 Copyright F.A.Q.
• Creative Commons' Termination of Transfers F.A.Q.
• Spider Robinson's 1983 short story: Melancholy Elephants
• Madeleine Baran's Copyright and Music: A History Told in MP3s
• International and Comparative Copyright Resources
• The World Intellectual Property Organization Home Page
• The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works
• The WIPO COPYRIGHT TREATY.
• The WIPO PERFORMANCES AND PHONOGRAMS TREATY
• EBLIDA (European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associations)
• Euro-Copyrights.org
• UNESCO's collection of national copyright laws
• International Intellectual Property Alliance Home Page
• Canadian Intellectual Property Office Copyrights page.
• Australian Copyright Council
• Australian Digital Alliance
• Lehman, Lee & Xu's Intellectual Property Laws and Regulations in China
• Japan Copyright Research and Information Center

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Organizations with copyright on their agendas:

• ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC
• Association of American Publishers
• Association of Research Libraries
• Business Software Alliance
• Chilling Effects Clearinghouse
• Computer & Communications Industry Association
• Copyright Clearance Center
• The Creative Commons
• DigitalConsumer.org
• Digital Future Coalition
• Digital Media Association
• Downhill Battle
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Free Software Foundation
• The Future of Music Coalition
• The Home Recording Rights Coalition
• The Internet Archive
• Motion Picture Association of America
• National Music Publishers Association
• National Writers Union
• New Yorkers for Fair Use
• Organization for Transformative Works
• Public Knowledge
• Public Library of Science
• QuestionCopyright.org
• The Recording Industry Association of America
• RespectCopyrights.Org
• Software & Information Industry Association
• Subpoena Defense
• TeleRead Home Page

 

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NEWS & OTHER INTERESTING THINGS...



• Slate's Farhad Manjoo reports that Google is losing massive amounts of money on YouTube, and that it appears to have no business model likely to turn it around. Other sites that feature user-generated content appear to face the same predicament: advertisers are reluctant to pay to show their ads alongside content created by amateurs, even if that's what people are watching.

 

• Barbara Ringer has died. Ringer joined the examining division of the Copyright Office in 1949, immediately after graduation from law school, became head of the Renewal and Assignment section in 1951, and then Chief of the Examining division and Assistant Register. She was appointed Register of Copyrights in 1973, and served until 1980. Ringer was the single person most nearly responsible for drafting the original 1976 Act. In 1993, she returned to the Copyright Office as acting Register after the resignation of Register Ralph Oman. Ringer was 83. Bill Patry has posted a short tribute.

 

• Mike Sadowitz recommends this New York Times article, by Kevin J. O'Brien, describing a law likely to be enacted in France that responds to unauthorizing downloads of music and film by disconnecting downloaders from the Internet:
  "The law empowers music and film industry associations to hire companies to analyze the downloads of individual users to detect piracy, and to report violations to a new agency overseeing copyright protection. The agency would be authorized to trace the illegal downloads back to individuals using the downloading computer’s unique identification number, known as its Internet Protocol, or IP, address, which the Internet service providers have on record. For a first violation, the agency would send a warning by e-mail message. If a user made another illegal download within three months, he would receive a second warning by certified mail. If a third infraction occurred within a year, the service providers would be required to sever service."
  Mike says: "Yeah, this will work."
  
  • UPDATE: The BBC reports that the bill failed to pass the National Assembly, apparently because of objections to a provision that obliged users to continue to pay their ISPs for Internet service after termination.

 

• Matt Weinberg calls our attention to this NY Times story, which reports that online newspapers are mulling plans to try, again, to charge the general public for access to their news stories.

 

• The Associated Press reports that the Associated Press has announced an aggressive new campaign to police unlicensed use of its news content. AP President Tom Curley suggested in a speech he gave yesterday that the campaign will include both "hot news" misappropriation claims modeled on the 1918 INS v. AP case (Casebook p. 689), and the use of digital rights management technology to track AP content on the Internet.

 

• The Reading Rights Coalition ("No need for greed; we want to read") has announced a demonstration today at the NYC headquarters of the Authors' Guild to protest the Guild's objections to the Amazon.com Kindle's text-to-speech tool.

 

• Benjamin Bradford calls our attention to Dave McNary's account (for Variety) of yesterday's congressional hearing on foreign piracy of US movies and music. Representative Howard Berman announced his intention to introduce legislation "that will begin to elevate the attention given to intellectual property concerns abroad."

 

• On remand from the 10th Circuit, the district court in Golan v. Holder has struck down § 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act, codified at 17 USC § 104A, as unconstitutional under the 1st Amendment. The district court's decision is HERE.

 

• As a followup to Brian Willen's discussion of the YouTube litigation, read Greg Sandoval's Is AT&T violating DMCA by not booting ‘repeat infringers’? for c|net's News.com.

 

• The Supreme Court has granted certiorari in Reed Elsvier v. Muchnick, the latest installment of Tasini v. NYTimes, "limited to the following question: Does 17 U.S.C. § 411(a) restrict the subject matter jurisdiction of the federal courts over copyright infringement actions?"  Read the MTTLR blog post.

 

• Amazon.com has introduced a new version of its Kindle ebook reader, with an experimental read aloud feature. The Author's Guild has complained. Paul Aiken, the Guild's Executive Director, insists, "They don't have the right to read a book out loud." Read Geoff Fowler's and Jeff Trachtenberg's story for the Wall Street Journal. (Thanks to Professor Chon for the tip!)
  • UPDATE: Amazon decided to accede to the Author's Guild's requests that it permit them to disable to Kindle's read-aloud feature. Read Greg Sandoval's article for c|net News.com

 

• Michael Sadowitz calls our attention to this blog post, which raises the question whether Microsoft's songsmith causes copyright infringement, and, if so, by whom?

 

• Judge Nancy Gertner has granted defendant's motion in P2P case Sony BMG Music v. Joel Tennenbaum to webcast the January 22 oral argument on Tennenbaum's counterclaims against the recording industry. Tennenbaum is represented by Professor Charlie Nesson of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and the Berkman Center will host the stream of next Thursday's hearing.
  • Update: Judge Gertner has delayed the hearing until February 24 to allow plaintiffs time for an emergency appeal.

 

• Matteo Negrinotti calls our attention to Toni Wine's and Carol Bayer Sager's 1965 Groovy Kind of Love (performed here by Phil Collins) and Ivan Grazinai's suspiciously similar 1979 Agnese dolce Agnese. Both share melodic progressions with the Rondo from a Sonatina written 200 years earlier by composer Muzio Clementi: Listen to www.youtube.com/watch?v=AU6Fp1Hugyo.

 

• The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Recording Industry Association of America has decided to stop filing copyright infringement lawsuits against large numbers of individual consumers caught using peer-to-peer file sharing software. In the five years of "John Doe" lawsuits, the recording industry has sued more than 35,000 people, according to Journal reporters Sarah McBride and Ethan Smith. The RIAA will abandon that strategy in favor of one that enlists Internet Service Providers to be its copyright cops.

 

• In what may be one of the earliest cases of You-Tube induced litigation, Joe Satriani has sued Coldplay, alleging that Coldplay's 2008 song Viva La Vida "copies substantial original portions" of his 2004 song If I Could Fly. The similarities between the two songs were noted last June on a video posted to YouTube by a 19-year-old from the UK who posts mashups under the nom-du-YouTube "iGotSpaceLikeNASA." Coldplay denies the claim.
  
  • December 18 Update: There's a provision in the copyright statute that strongly encourages Internet Service Providers to block access to any material residing on the ISP's servers if a copyright owner notifies the ISP that the material infringes its copyright. If you clicked on the link to the YouTube video, you discovered that YouTube has removed it in response to a copyright complaint by EMI -- Coldplay's record label. At which point, the blogosphere exploded with reports like this one. Meanwhile, the discussion on Youtube continues. For a preview of just about every issue in the course, try searching YouTube for "Satriani v. Coldplay" and clicking on a few of the results.

 

• In the aftermath of the Supreme Court's ruling in the Tasini case, lawyers for plaintiffs and defendants reached a class action settlement of all writers' claims for past unauthorized inclusion of their freelance articles in defendants' databases. A year ago, the Court of Appeals for the 2d Circuit threw out the settlement. The majority reasoned that most of the claims involved infringement of copyrights that had not been registered. Since federal court jurisdiction over copyright infringement cases requires registration of the copyrights of works of U.S. origin, the 2d Circuit concluded that the district court lacked the jurisdiction to certify a class consisting of claims arising from the infringement of unregistered copyrights, and therefore could not approve a settlement with respect to those claims. (Thanks to Lauren Schrero for the story!)
  
  • An interesting side note: While the appeal was pending, two of the judges on the panel discovered that they were probably members of the plaintiff class, since their law review articles and speeches had been included in some of defendants' databases. They announced that they would renounce all proceeds from the settlement, but it was too late. Under the terms of the settlement, they had failed to file a claim before the deadline. They sought the advice of Judicial Conference's Committee on Codes of Conduct; the Committee advised the two affected judges that they should recuse themselves from the case. The judges, though, decided that they disagreed, and issued an opinion explaining why they were declining to follow the committee's advice. Since their decision on the merits of the appeal throws out the settlement, of course, it also gets rid of that pesky deadline for filing a claim.
  (The Supreme Court granted certiorari on the case on March 2, limited to the following question: "Does 17 U.S.C. §411(a) restrict the subject matter jurisdiction of the federal courts over copyright infringement actions?" )


• Recently enacted copyright laws:
  • Public Law 110-403, The Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Rights Act["PRO-IP Act"] of 2008
  • Public Law 110-434, The Vessel Hull Design Protection Amendments of 2008
  • Public Law 110-435, The Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008
  
  

• New Bills in the 111th Congress:
  • H.R. 810, Fair Copyright in Research Works Act
  • H,R, 848, To provide parity in radio performance rights
  • S. 379, Performance Rights Act

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Copyright Blogs

• Copyfight
• K. Matthew Dames's Copycense
• Michael Geist's Blog
• Joe Gratz's Blog at joegratz.net
• The MTTLR Blog
• M. Claire Stewart's Current Copyright Readings Blog
• Patrick Ross's Copyright Alliance Blog
• Ray Beckerman's and Ty Rogers's Recording Industry v. The People blog
• Free Culture @ NYU
• Ed Felten's Freedom to Tinker
• Creative Commons weblog
• You Thought We Wouldn't Notice (Thanks to John Geis for the link!)
• Bill Patry's Copyright Blog archive

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A sampling of Internet sites raising copyright questions:

• bopaboo
• Slate, Can Photographers Be Plagiarists? slide show
  • thanks to Ariel Henderson and Danielle Barbour for the link!
• ditto.com visual search engine
• Streambox
• Telebubby Fun Land
• Olga OnLine Guitar Archive
• Camp Chaos
• Monolith
• Barry Kite's Aberrant Art
• Warriors of the Empire
• The Early Edition (Days of Our Lives spoilers)
• Google Book Search
• King County (Seattle) Library System ecollection
• MP3Board.com
• Free Republic
• Wikipedia
• Internet Archive: Building a digital library for the future
• Arnaldo Lerma's home page on Scientology and Dianetics
• Angst & Romance
• Let Them Sing It For You
• Professor David Touretzky's Gallery of CSS Descramblers

 

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Return to the syllabus

 

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Send an email message to me at jdlitman -at- umich.edu