The Supreme Court’s Landmark First User Copyright Decision Last week the United States Supreme Court issued a landmark copyright ruling in Kirtsaeng v. Wiley (link goes to a PDF of the full decision). The case concerned the “First Sale” Doctrine, which holds that once a consumer lawfully purchases a copyrighted good, the distribution rights embodied in the copyright are exhausted, and the owner of the product has the right to sell or otherwise dispose of that individual good as he or she pleases. To put it another way, if I buy a copy of Baseball Prospectus 2013 from Amazon, read…
Menu
Archives: Copyrights
Oz the Great and Copyrightable
March 12, 2013
Oz the Great and Copyrightable Disney’s newest fantasy-adventure, Oz the Great and Powerful, was a box office hit last weekend. Filmgoers managed to overlook the absence of certain well-known elements of the Wizard of Oz, most notably Dorothy Gale and her ruby slippers. Was this just because the new Oz movie is a prequel to the beloved classic? Or does the answer require a journey into the Haunted Forest of intellectual property law?
Myspace Relaunches, Encounters Copyright Issue
January 25, 2013
Myspace Relaunches, Encounters Copyright Issue Remember MySpace? Well, it’s back – this time, as Myspace. Maybe the newly private, scaled-down business couldn’t afford the capital “S.” The site relaunched last week and immediately ran into a copyright infringement issue.
Judge Rules News Agencies Can’t Use Twitter Photos Without Permission
January 18, 2013
Judge Rules News Agencies Can’t Use Twitter Photos Without Permission In a landmark social media law case, a Federal judge in New York ruled this week that news agencies can’t publish photos found on Twitter without the photographer’s permission. Neither the fact that the photos were certainly newsworthy – they portrayed images of the devastating earthquake in Haiti – nor that Twitter allows anyone to reproduce the photos (via re-Tweeting) were enough to overcome the photographer’s rights under copyright law.
