Patricia Aufderheide is a Professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington. She is also the Director of the Center for Social Media. The U.S. doctrine of fair use is getting a healthy workout, and it seems like every challenge is making it stronger. In fact, fair use is becoming a very […]
42 years after playing the memorable organ solo on “A Whiter Shade of Pale”, ex-Procol Harum organist Matthew Fisher has finally been awarded a share of the song’s royalties. Despite penning the melody from the British band’s most popular song, Fisher was never acknowledged as one of the song’s authors. Now, in one of the […]
Infopaq, founded in Denmark in 1998, is a media monitoring and analysis company. One of their services is the monitoring of keywords that appear in newspaper text. To achieve this, Infopaq scans newspaper pages and the uses software to turn the image of the page into text. If pre-determined keywords that clients want monitored appear […]
It is often said that imitation is the greatest form of flattery, but in the world of copyright, flattery is a much more controversial act. If you are not already familiar with the Shepard Fairey v. The Associated Press controversy, hop over to this site and take a look at the two pictures. The original […]
The National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in the United Kingdom holds the most extensive collection of portraits in the world. Over the past five years, the gallery has been working on its £1 million project of digitising its entire collection for viewing online. In addition to the low resolution images of the complete works, the NPG […]
Despite the ominous verdict from the Swedish court which sentenced The Pirate Bay (TPB) operators to a year in prison and a penalty of US $3.6 million for facilitating copyright infringement, TPB may soon have new life breathed into the service. Global Gaming Factory X, a Swedish software company, has offered to purchase TPB for […]
Roger S. Fisher, Ph.D., LL.B. teaches a course on copyright policy at York University to third year Fine Arts students. He is a member of the Bar of Ontario and currently represents a non-profit academic journal that is one of over two hundred third- and fourth-party defendants in a class action lawsuit involving a copyright […]
Stephen Sharon is a recent graduate of Touro Law School in New York where he focused on intellectual property. Stephen was also the first place winner of the Nathan Burkan Memorial Competition sponsored by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) for his submission of a case study about the legal battle between […]
Despite the fact the enforcement of intellectual property rights in the United States fashion design industry, relative to other innovative sectors such as computing, music, television and film, may seem non-existent, fashion accounts for $200 billion in sales annually in the U.S. Two prominent legal scholars, Kal Raustiala and Christopher Springman, have written a series […]
Fashion is everywhere you look. In the US, the fashion industry’s annual sales are higher than those of books, movies and music combined. Everyone wears clothes, whether for necessity, the desire to follow current trends, or for any reason in between. Fashion can be an indication of an individual’s social status, and also reflects cultural […]