Singularity Law

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 [...]

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 [...]

Last Thursday, Josh Kagan gave a talk on Web 2.0 law for my Internet & E-Commerce Law class here at Southwestern Law School. Josh covered several interesting topics, including copyleft licenses, DMCA takedown abuse, and blogger issues. This is a webcast of that talk.
This is a QuickTime video, so to view it in a larger window [...]

 

 From Pages to Platforms: The Law of Web 2.0 and Beyond: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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 [...]

What happens to existing distribution networks when new methods of distribution become feasible? The general rule has been that existing distributors will pressure producers to eschew these new forms of distribution to protect the existing distributors’ business. We saw that several years ago when IBM and Blockbuster announced a service that would allow users to [...]

My son, also named Michael, is a budding filmmaker (alright, so is half of LA). About three years ago, when he was a junior at UCLA he and a friend made a short fan film for a Star Wars fan site. The video (called Ryan v. Dorkman) featured a laser sword fight including special effects [...]