A Recent Decision by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York Involving Twitter May Have Significant Implications for Online Publications
The exponential growth of social media, and the inevitable conflicts that result, is leading to more and more litigation. In many instances, courts are being asked to apply laws crafted before the Internet era to these modern disputes.
Only a small fraction of television news broadcasts are made available online. For a party to monitor and view all news coverage of an event, it would essentially have to watch and record all news broadcasts 24/7. That's exactly what media-monitoring service TVEyes did. There was no dispute that TVEyes had copied Fox News's content. Instead, the issue was whether TVEyes's service constituted fair use.
On Nov. 28, 2017, the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit issued its opinion in Signature Mgmt. Team, LLC v. Doe. The case involved a John Doe defendant's effort to remain anonymous even after having been adjudicated liable for copyright infringement of plaintiff's business training manual.
Just a few days after the Florida Supreme Court ruled the state's common law doesn't provide pre-1972 sound recordings with rights to public performance royalties, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard oral arguments on whether remasterings inject pre-1972 sound recordings with federal copyright protection.
In the context of a copyright case, a defendant's prior bad acts and prior conduct are more useful to a plaintiff than is typical in civil litigation. In many instances, copyright infringement lawsuits are brought against defendants who have been sued before for infringement, or related misconduct, or who have been the subject of allegations or informal complaints, or who simply have experience in copyright matters.
Lawyers for Marvin Gaye's heirs and recording artists Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke were singing past each other in court in October. But it wasn't clear which side was making the most headway with the appellate court.
The European Commission (EU) is ramping up pressure on tech companies to more aggressively use automated filtering to scrub "illegal" content from the Internet, a move that is drawing criticism from some lawyers and free speech activists in Silicon Valley.
In 2016, Frederik Colting and Melisa Medina planned to launch a series of 50 children's books, each book summarizing a great novel. They called their colorfully illustrated summaries KinderGuides. In January 2017, the owners of the copyrights to the novels filed a copyright infringement suit against Colting and Medina, resulting in a useful tale for lawyers who advise publishers on either side of such a dispute.
Susan Kohlmann, managing partner of Jenner & Block's New York office, has secured a shutout win for the stepdaughter of John Steinbeck in the latest installment of a long-running legal feud over book rights that has divided the late author's progeny.
"Star Wars is still Star Wars, even without Princess Leia's bikini scene," said federal Circuit Judge Andrew D. Hurwitz in denying an appeal by the movie-filtering service VidAngel to lift an injunction that has kept its technology off the market since December 2016.
