The Volokh Conspiracy: Happy Fourth to you all! Along with 90 (and still counting) other Internet law and IP law professors, I have signed a letter (drafted by Dave Levine, Mark Lemley, and me) in opposition to Sen. Leahy’s “PROTECT IP Act.” [The letter is posted below — the text of the bill, if you’re into that sort of thing, is posted here.]
Estate of Denial: The comic book industry began life in the early 20th century as the province of con men who stripped artists of their creations, then moved on to the next mark. The artists who were paid virtually nothing for work on characters that are now worth billions at the movies are nearly all dead. But their heirs are beginning to speak for them through a federal copyright law that practically invites descendants to sue for ownership interests in characters whose current value could never have been imagined at the moment of creation.
Wall St. Journal: “SAP AG must pay $1.3 billion to rival Oracle Corp. for copyright infringement, a federal jury ruled Tuesday [November 23, 2010], following a high-profile court battle between the business-software makers.”
The Volokh Conspiracy: “In my classes in IP law and copyright, I sometimes have difficulty conveying to students the ‘cost’ side of the copyright regime.”
The New York Times: has an interesting article on what it is like for employees of performing rights organizations who work in the trenches of enforcing music copyrights. “Broadcast Music Incorporated, otherwise known as BMI. The firm is a P.R.O., or performing rights organization; P.R.O.’s license the music of the songwriters and music publishers they represent, collecting royalties whenever that music is played in a public setting. . . . Performing rights organizations in the United States came into being in 1914, when a group of musicians, including Victor Herbert, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin and John Philip Sousa, founded the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, otherwise known as ASCAP, the nation’s first P.R.O., in 1914.”