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Full-Text Articles in Law
Paypal Is New Money: Extending Secondary Copyright Liability Safe Harbors To Online Payment Processors, Erika Douglas
Paypal Is New Money: Extending Secondary Copyright Liability Safe Harbors To Online Payment Processors, Erika Douglas
Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has shaped the Internet as we know it. This legislation shields online service providers from secondary copyright infringement liability in exchange for takedown of infringing content of their users. Yet online payment processors, the backbone of $300 billion in U.S. e-commerce, are completely outside of the DMCA’s protection. This Article uses PayPal, the most popular online payment company in the U.S., to illustrate the growing risk of secondary liability for payment processors. First it looks at jurisprudence that expands secondary copyright liability online, and explains how it might be applied to PayPal. Then it …
Tollbooths And Newsstands On The Information Superhighway, Brad A. Greenberg
Tollbooths And Newsstands On The Information Superhighway, Brad A. Greenberg
Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review
Countering the perception that speech limitations affecting distribution necessarily reduce access to information, this Essay proffers that copyright expansions actually can increase access and thereby serve important copyright and First Amendment values. In doing so, this discussion contributes to the growing literature and two recent Supreme Court opinions discussing whether copyright law and First Amendment interests can coexist.
Geographically Restricted Streaming Content And Evasion Of Geolocation: The Applicability Of The Copyright Anticircumvention Rules, Jerusha Burnett
Geographically Restricted Streaming Content And Evasion Of Geolocation: The Applicability Of The Copyright Anticircumvention Rules, Jerusha Burnett
Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review
A number of methods currently exist or are being developed to determine where Internet users are located geographically when they access a particular webpage. Yet regardless of the precautions taken by website operators to limit the locations from which they allow access, it is likely that users will find ways to gain access to restricted content. Should the evasion of geolocation constitute circumvention of access controls so that § 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") applies? Because location data can properly be considered personally identifiable information ("PII"), this Note argues that § 1201 should not apply absent a …
Whose Social Network Account: A Trade Secret Approach To Allocating Rights, Zoe Argento
Whose Social Network Account: A Trade Secret Approach To Allocating Rights, Zoe Argento
Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review
Who has the superior right to a social network account? This is the question in a growing number of disputes between employers and workers over social network accounts. The problem has no clear legal precedent. Although the disputes implicate rights under trademark, copyright, and privacy law, these legal paradigms fail to address the core issue. At base, disputes over social network accounts are disputes over the right to access the people, sometimes numbering in the tens of thousands, who follow an account. This Article evaluates the problem from the perspective of the public interest in social network use, particularly the …
Fighting The First Sale Doctrine: Strategies For A Struggling Film Industry, Sage Vanden Heuvel
Fighting The First Sale Doctrine: Strategies For A Struggling Film Industry, Sage Vanden Heuvel
Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review
The first sale doctrine, codified at 17 U.S.C. § 109, grants the owners of a copy of a copyrighted work the right to sell, rent, or lease that copy without permission from the copyright owner. This doctrine, first endorsed by the Supreme Court in Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus, was established at a time when the owner of a good necessarily had to forego possession in order to sell or lease the item to another.[...] The changes in technology and industry over the past two decades threaten to upend this balance. In today's digital world, an owner of a copy of …
Everything In Its Right Place: Social Cooperation And Artist Compensation, Leah Belsky, Byron Kahr, Max Berkelhammer, Yochai Benkler
Everything In Its Right Place: Social Cooperation And Artist Compensation, Leah Belsky, Byron Kahr, Max Berkelhammer, Yochai Benkler
Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review
The music industry's crisis response to the Internet has been the primary driver of U.S. copyright policy for over a decade. The core institutional response has been to increase the scope of copyright and the use of litigation, prosecution, and technical control mechanisms for its enforcement. The assumption driving these efforts has been that without heavily-enforced copyright, artists will not be able to make a living from their art. Throughout this period artists have been experimenting with approaches that do not rely on technological or legal enforcement, but on constructing web-based business models that engage fans and rely on voluntary …
Copyright And Youtube: Pirate's Playground Or Fair Use Forum?, Kurt Hunt
Copyright And Youtube: Pirate's Playground Or Fair Use Forum?, Kurt Hunt
Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review
The entertainment industry has a history of framing new technology as piracy that threatens its very existence, regardless of the potential benefits of the technology or the legal limits of copyright rights. In the case of YouTube, copyright owners' attempts to retain content control negatively impact the public's ability to discuss culture in an online world. This implicates the basic policy behind fair use: to prevent copyright law from "stifl[ing] the very creativity which that law is designed to foster." The internet has become a powerful medium for expression. It is a vital tool in today's world for sharing original …
Three Reactions To Mgm V. Grokster, Pamela Samuelson
Three Reactions To Mgm V. Grokster, Pamela Samuelson
Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review
It was prescient of the Michigan Telecommunications and Technology Law Review to have organized a conference to discuss the Supreme Court's decision in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc. v. Grokster, Inc. As the articles in this issue reveal, commentators have had somewhat mixed reactions to the Grokster decision. Perhaps I am the most mixed (or mixed up) about Grokster among its commentators, for I have had not just one but three reactions to the Grokster decision. My first reaction was to question whether MGM and its co-plaintiffs really won the Grokster case, or at least won it in the way they had hoped. …
File Sharing, Copyright, And The Optimal Production Of Music, Gerald R. Faulhaber
File Sharing, Copyright, And The Optimal Production Of Music, Gerald R. Faulhaber
Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review
Much economic, political, judicial and legal attention has been showered on the significant changes currently taking place within the music production and distribution business forced by the use of the Internet for both file sharing (of unauthorized copyrighted material) and more recent online (legal) music distribution. The strong demand for music, coupled with the low cost of distributing illegal copies via peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, is unraveling the business model by which music has traditionally been created, developed, and distributed. Application of traditional copyright law has been ineffective in stopping the loss of business in the traditional channels. Producers have implemented …
The Half-Fairness Of Google's Plan To Make The World's Collection Of Books Searchable, Steven Hetcher
The Half-Fairness Of Google's Plan To Make The World's Collection Of Books Searchable, Steven Hetcher
Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review
Google's major new initiative is to undertake the task of digitizing the world's collection of books so as to make them searchable. The very idea is audacious, but what is more so is that Google plans to copy without first seeking the permission of the owners of these works. Google Print would make available what is, by conventional measures at least, the highest grade of information--books produced by millions of the world's leading scholars. This is in stark contrast to the inconsistent quality spectrum one encounters through other online sources such as peer-to-peer networks and blogs, where there currently exists …
From The Cluetrain To The Panopticon: Isp Activity Characterization And Control Of Internet Communications, Eric Evans
From The Cluetrain To The Panopticon: Isp Activity Characterization And Control Of Internet Communications, Eric Evans
Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review
If ISPs are exposed to liability for forwarding others' messages--messages originating with other ISPs or with the ISP's own users--the norm of universal mutual message forwarding that underlies the present operation of the Internet will be threatened. This Note will argue that society presently confronts a choice between a common carrier Internet characterized by universal mutual message forwarding and a monitored and controlled Internet. Part I will describe the underlying rules that govern ISPs' liability for their users' actions. Part II will argue that the present statutory regime governing ISPs' liability for users' copyright infringement includes elements that provide ISPs …
Quibbles'n Bits: Making A Digital First Sale Doctrine Feasible, Victor F. Calaba
Quibbles'n Bits: Making A Digital First Sale Doctrine Feasible, Victor F. Calaba
Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review
Whereas the first sale doctrine historically permitted the transfer and resale of copyrighted works, license agreements used by software companies and the DMCA's strict rules prohibiting tampering with access control devices frustrate exercise of the first sale doctrine with respect to many forms of digital works[...] This article explores the first sale doctrine as it pertains to digital works and proposes ways to make a digital first sale doctrine feasible. Part II describes the first sale doctrine as it has traditionally been applied to non-digital works. Part III discusses modern technology's impact on the distribution and use of copyrighted material. …
Internet Framing: Complement Or Hijack , Raymond Chan
Internet Framing: Complement Or Hijack , Raymond Chan
Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review
Currently, the technology of "framing" allows a web site to: (1) pull in the contents of an external site into the local site; (2) "chop" up the contents of the external site into different "frames" or parts; and (3) display only the frames that are beneficial to the framing site. When an advertisements is blocked off by a frame, an advertiser who paid to advertise at an external (framed) site may cease to purchase advertising space from that external site if the framing activities of another web site prevent the advertisement from reaching prospective viewers. From the perspective of the …
Profits In Cyberspace: Should Newspaper And Magazine Publishers Pay Freelance Writers For Digital Content?, Rod Dixon Esq.
Profits In Cyberspace: Should Newspaper And Magazine Publishers Pay Freelance Writers For Digital Content?, Rod Dixon Esq.
Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review
It is remarkable how fast recent trends have driven an increasing number of publishers of magazines, newspapers, and other similar works to port the print version of their works to digital and electronic format in the form of online computer databases and multimedia CDROM technologies. Online computer databases and CD-ROM media can be exceptionally profitable ventures for publishers who convert a preexisting print work into a digital product. However, publishers' profits from digital media may be impaired if there is a question as to whether the publisher has satisfactorily secured the copyright to the material making up the digital media. …