Posts Tagged: "Copyright Act"

SCOTUS Grants Solicitor General’s Bid to Argue in Case About Retrospective Relief Under Copyright Act

The U.S. Supreme Court today granted a request by the U.S. Solicitor General to participate in oral argument as an amicus in Warner Chappell Music v. Nealy, which challenges a circuit court ruling that, under the discovery accrual rule, monetary damages for infringement under the Copyright Act are available for acts occurring outside of the Copyright Act’s three-year statute of limitations. The Solicitor General is urging the Supreme Court to affirm the lower ruling and uphold the Eleventh Circuit’s interpretation of the High Court’s ruling in Petrella v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (2013) over competing interpretations in the Second Circuit.

Ninth Circuit Delivers Win for Instagram in Photographers’ Copyright Case

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit yesterday upheld a district court ruling that embedding images from Instagram posts in third-party websites does not constitute copyright infringement. The case has to do with two photographers’ images that were embedded and posted with articles run by Buzzfeed News and Time from the photographers’ public Instagram accounts. The district court and the Ninth Circuit both cited Perfect 10 v. Amazon as precluding relief.

Licensor Beware: Copyright Protections in Peril

Companies rely on copyright protections to shield their software, data sets, and other works that are licensed to their customers; however, a reframing of what constitutes a “transformative use,” and the extent a license can restrict such fair uses, may whittle away all avenues of protections. On October 22, 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States heard arguments for Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith. The question before the Court is where does a copyright holder’s right to create derivative works stop and “fair use” of the work begin? Companies that license data sets or data feeds should pay close attention, as the Court’s decision could narrow contractual remedies. 

High Court Asks Solicitor General for Views on Genius-Google Copyright Preemption Case

The U.S. Supreme Court today invited the Solicitor General’s views in a copyright case that asks the High Court to grant a petition on the question of whether the Copyright Act’s preemption clause allows a business “to invoke traditional state-law contract remedies to enforce a promise not to copy and use its content?” The petition was brought by ML Genius Holdings (Genius), an online platform for transcribing and annotating song lyrics, against Google and LyricFind, which Genius claims breached its website Terms of Service by “stealing Genius’s work and placing the lyrics on its own competing site, drastically decreasing web traffic to Genius as a result.”

White Paper Proposes Solutions for Overhaul of Section 512

The International Center for Law and Economics (ICLE) released a white paper on Thursday arguing that Section 512 of Title 17 of the Copyright Act has been a failure, and it should be reevaluated and overhauled. Congress passed Section 512 as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and authors Kristian Stout and Geoffrey Manne argue the federal courts have written out key provisions in the law. Stout and Manne write that Section 512 has succeeded in allowing online service providers (OSPs) such as social media companies to grow and thrive by providing a safe harbor provision as long as they take down infringement promptly. However, the authors argue that the law has failed to provide proper incentives and systems to prevent digital piracy