Singularity Law

The newspaper industry is suffering. At least one newspaper is closing down each week in the United States, and this trend is likely to continue unless the industry makes some radical changes in their way of thinking. Unfortunately, those who control most of the newspapers in the United States just don’t get it. These publishers [...]

When I began practicing in the field of computer law (a quaint term today), a good computer lawyer had to know contract law, and some tax law — and that was pretty much all. Patents were available for hardware, but not software; the Copyright Office still had its doubts about the copyrightability of computer programs; [...]

As many newspapers fold or downsize, companies that make their money from selling content to those newspapers are running into financial problems as well. One of the most visible, and outspoken, of those companies is Associated Press (AP). AP is an American news agency that aggregates stories written by its members and its own staff [...]

Last month I was honored to speak at the mid-Winter Copyright Society U.S.A. meeting in San Francisco. My presentation was focused primarily on the Google book search settlement, and its implications for copyright owners in general. I had previously written on how I felt that Google had gotten the better end of the deal, which [...]

Over the past several years there have been a steady stream of stories about the record industry pursuing alleged song downloaders from P2P networks. While hundreds of lawsuits have been filed against those who have downloaded songs from the Internet, thousands of alleged downloaders have received “settlement letters,” which accuse them of copyright infringement and [...]

Several weeks ago now, Google announced the settlement of a copyright infringement case filed against it by a group of American publishers who objected to the Google Book Search project. (I recently wrote about the settlement here.) The Google Book Search project has the goal of digitizing virtually every book ever published, and making that [...]

In September 2005, Google was sued by the Authors Guild, the American Association of Publishers and a number of individual authors for copyright infringement for its “Google Book Search” project (which was launched in 2004). The plaintiffs claimed that the project was “massive copyright infringement” and should be shut down. Google held the plaintiffs at [...]

Congress recent passed, and the President signed the PRO-IP Act (”Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2007″). The Act established a new cabinet-level position, an “IP enforcement czar,” that would report to the President and coordinate enforcement efforts across government.
Over the last 20 years we have seen a steady erosion of the [...]

In a recent filing with a federal court in Minnesota, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) asserts that it should be permitted to recover up to $150,000 per copyrighted movie allegedly traded online using P2P file sharing without having to prove that anyone actually made a copy of that movie. That is in [...]

The blogosphere has been afire about actions taken by Associated Press (AP) against the Drudge Retort last week. According to reports, AP sent a series of DMCA take down notices to the Drudge Retort demanding that the blog remove six items (including one user comment) that quoted AP headlines or snippets of content from AP [...]