Required Texts:
2/7/12: Sister Sledge and Ronee Blakley have filed a class action suit against Warner Music Group, alleging that Warner has failed to pay the royalties called for in their recording contracts for licensed digital downloads and ringtones. Eminem won a similar lawsuit against his record label in 2010.
2/7/12: Capitol Records sued Redigi, a cloud music service that purports to allow resale of unwanted Apple iTunes music tracks. (We talked about this case in Monday’s class.) Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Sullivan denied both ReDigi’s motion to dismiss the suit and Capitol Records’ request for a preliminary injunction.
1/20/12: When we last checked in with MegaUpload, the cyberlocker service had sued Universal Music for abusing the DMCA by removing a video from YouTube that did not infringe any UMG copyrights, apparently in violation of UMG’s contract with YouTube. On Thursday (the day following the Internet SOPA protest) the United States Department of Justice announced that, on January 5, 2012, its intellectual property task force had indicted MegaUpload and the individuals associated with it for running an international criminal conspiracy to commit copyright infringement. New Zealand authorities have arrested four of the company's principals; they are currently awaiting extradition. The Justice Deparment seized MegaUpload’s domain names and took the site offline; it also seized fifty million dollars worth of assets. In response to the announcement, hacktivist collectiver Anonymous attacked and succeeded in temporarily shutting down the websites of the U.S. Department of Justice, UMG, the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America.
1/18/12: The Supreme Court has released its opinion in Golan v. Holder. Justice Ginsburg, for a majority of six, holds that Congress acted within its Constitutional authority when it removed foreign works from the public domain in Section 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act. Justice Breyer, joined by Justice Alito, dissented.
1/6/12: The Associated Press, New York Times, Washington Post and 26 other news organizations have launched NewsRight, a joint venture seeking to collect license fees from websites that make use of their "news content." Read the AP news story via the Washington Post, or Andrew Phelps’s post for the Neiman Journalism Lab.
1/1/12: The Sunday New York Times published an article about the impact of copyright law on contemporary visual art in general and appropriation art in particular. Artist Richard Prince is appealing a judgment that his Canal Zone series of paintings infringed the copyright of photographer Patrick Cariou.
12/15/11: The recording industry association has described Hong Kong-based cyberlocker service MegaUpload as a "notorious service ... rife with illegal music, movies and other copyrighted work." On December 9, MegaUpload released a catchy promotional video chock full of celebrity endorsements, posting it on YouTube, Vimeo, and other video sites. Universal Music promptly demanded that YouTube remove the video. YouTube (or, rather, its automated takedown tool) obligingly blocked the video. Nothing in the video, however, appears to infringe any copyright that UMG owns. On December 12, MegaUpload filed suit against Warner Music for knowingly misrepresenting that the video infringed its copyrights, in violation of 17 USC § 512(f). On December 15, UMG filed its response: It informs the court that its (secret) contract with Youtube entitles it to demand takedown of videos for reasons other than copyright infringement, and that it did so in this case without sending a section 512 takedown notice. Therefore, it claims, it can't be liable for misrepresentation under section 512(f).
11/29/11: On November 24, the European Union ruled that EU law prohibits national courts from issuing injunctions that require ISPs to install a filtering system to prevent illegal downloading of files.
11/27/11: Beyonce’s video for Countdown reflects suprising similarities to the work of Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Read news coverage here, here, here, and here. Watch De Keersmaeker’s work here and here. See one YouTube comparison here. Beyonce has now released a purged version.
11/1/11: Gagosian Gallery hosted a show of original paintings by Bob Dylan in the fall of 2011, billed as a visual reflection of Dylan’s travels in Asia. Shortly after the exhibit opened, the New York Times reported that Dylan’s fans had identified preexisting photographs that appear to be the models for Dylan's paintings. ArtInfo.com posted a slideshow comparing Dylan’s paintings with the photographs here.
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