Law Commons^™

Will Sony’S Fourth Playstation Lead To A Second Sony V. Universal?, Seth Ascher

Duke Law & Technology Review

Sony has included a “share” button on the next version of their popular PlayStation video game system. This feature is meant to allow players to record and share videos of their gameplay. This service shares similarities with the controversial “record” button that Sony included with its Betamax players over thirty years ago. The Betamax player was the subject of the landmark case Sony v. Universal, a foundational case for the modern application of copyright law to new technology. This Issue Brief examines how this “share” feature would fare under the framework laid out by Sony v. Universal and other evolutions …

Dmca Safe Harbors For Virtual Private Server Providers Hosting Bittorrent Clients, Stephen J. Wang

Duke Law & Technology Review

By the time the U.S. Supreme Court decided Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster Ltd. in 2005, Internet users around the globe who engaged in copyright infringement had already turned to newer, alternative forms of peer-to-peer filesharing. One recent development is the “seedbox,” a virtual private server rentable for use to download and upload (“seed”) files through the BitTorrent protocol. Because BitTorrent is widely used for both non-infringing and infringing purposes, the operators of seedboxes and other rentable BitTorrent-capable virtual private servers face the possibility of direct and secondary liability as did the defendants in Grokster and more recent cases like …

Mega, Digital Storage Lockers, And The Dmca: Will Innovation Be Stifled By Fears Of Piracy?, Ali V. Mirsaidi

Duke Law & Technology Review

Kim Dotcom, founder of Megaupload Limited, has been in many news headlines over the past year. Megaupload—one of Dotcom’s many peer-to-peer sharing sites—was the center of controversy, as it allowed users to upload and share all sorts of files, including copyrighted material. After an organized effort by the Department of Justice and several foreign governments, Dotcom was arrested for (secondary) copyright infringement and his site was ultimately shut down. Dotcom has recently launched a new service, MEGA, which he claims will evade copyright laws entirely. Like other well-known cloud-sharing services such as Dropbox and Google Drive, MEGA allows users to …

The Apple E-Book Agreement And Ruinous Competition: Are E-Goods Different For Antitrust Purposes?, Michael Wolfe

Duke Law & Technology Review

Publishers have spent the last decade and a half struggling against falling prices for digital goods. The recent antitrust case against Apple and the major publishers highlights collusive price fixing as a potential method for resisting depreciation.

This Article examines the myriad ways in which digital distribution puts downward pressure on prices, and seeks to determine whether or not collusive price fixing would serve as an appropriate response to such pressure given the goals of the copyright grant. Considering retailer bargaining power, increased access to substitutes, the loss of traditional price discrimination methods, the effects of vertical integration in digital …

The Jurisprudence Of Transformation: Intellectual Incoherence And Doctrinal Murkiness Twenty Years After Campbell V. Acuff-Rose Music, Matthew D. Bunker, Clay Calvert

Duke Law & Technology Review

Examining recent judicial opinions, this Article analyzes and critiques the transformative-use doctrine two decades after the U.S. Supreme Court introduced it into copyright law in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music. When the Court established the transformative-use concept, which plays a critical role in fair-use determinations today, its contours were relatively undefined. Drawing on an influential law-review article, the Court described a transformative use as one that adds “new expression, meaning or message.” Unfortunately, the doctrine and its application are increasingly ambiguous, with lower courts developing competing conceptions of transformation. This doctrinal murkiness is particularly disturbing because fair use is a key …