The giant record labels, their association, and their lobbyists have succeeded in getting a number of members of the U.S. House of Representatives to pressure Twitter to pay money it does not owe, to labels who have no claim to… Read More ›
Tag Archive for ‘Fair Use’
What Cops Understand About Copyright Filters: They Prevent Legal Speech
“You can record all you want. I just know it can’t be posted to YouTube,” said an Alameda County sheriff’s deputy to an activist. “I am playing my music so that you can’t post on YouTube.” The tactic didn’t work—the… Read More ›
Article 17 Copyright Directive: The Court of Justice’s Advocate General Rejects Fundamental Rights Challenge But Defends Users Against Overblocking
The Advocate General (AG) of the EU Court of Justice today missed an opportunity to fully protect internet users from censorship by automated filtering, finding that the disastrous Article 17 of the EU Copyright Directive doesn’t run afoul of Europeans’… Read More ›
Victory for Fair Use: The Supreme Court Reverses the Federal Circuit in Oracle v. Google
In a win for innovation, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that Google’s use of certain Java Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is a lawful fair use. In doing so, the Court reversed the previous rulings by the Federal Circuit and… Read More ›
Free as in Climbing: Rock Climber’s Open Data Project Threatened by Bogus Copyright Claims
Rock climbers have a tradition of sharing “beta”—helpful information about a route—with other climbers. Giving beta is both useful and a form of community-building within this popular sport. Given that strong tradition of sharing, we were disappointed to learn that… Read More ›
Thank You for Speaking Against a Terrible Copyright Proposal
Last week was the deadline for comments on the draft of the so-called “Digital Copyright Act,” a proposal which would fundamentally change how creativity functions online. We asked for creators to add their voices to the many groups opposing this… Read More ›
From Creativity to Exclusivity: The German Government's Bad Deal for Article 17
The implementation process of Article 17 (formerly Article 13) of the controversial Copyright Directive into national laws is in full swing, and it does not look good for users’ rights and freedoms. Several EU states have failed to present balanced… Read More ›
Cops Using Music to Try to Stop Being Filmed Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg
Someone tries to livestream their encounters with the police, only to find that the police started playing music. In the case of a February 5 meeting between an activist and the Beverly Hills Police Department, the song of choice was… Read More ›
Some Answers to Questions About the State of Copyright in 2021
In all the madness that made up the last month of 2020, a number of copyright bills and proposals popped up—some even became law before most people had any chance to review them. So now that the dust has settled… Read More ›
A Smorgasbord of Bad Takedowns: 2020 Year in Review
Here at EFF, we take particular notice of the way that intellectual property law leads to expression being removed from the Internet. We document the worst examples in our Takedown Hall of Shame. Some, we use to explain more complex… Read More ›