Podcasts about Berne Convention

This Day in Legal History: Sirhan Sirhan Sentenced to DeathOn April 23, 1969, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was formally sentenced to death for the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, a tragedy that shook the United States during a period of intense political and social upheaval. Kennedy had been shot on June 5, 1968, just after declaring victory in the California Democratic primary, and he died the following day. Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant, was apprehended at the scene with a gun in his hand and later confessed to the crime during police interrogation.Despite the confession and trial conviction, controversy has surrounded the case for decades. In 1972, Sirhan's death sentence was commuted to life in prison after the California Supreme Court invalidated the state's death penalty statutes. A resurgence of interest in the case came in 1998, when Sirhan's attorney Larry Teeter publicly argued that his client had not actually fired the fatal shot. Teeter pointed to alleged inconsistencies in the autopsy report and the number of bullets fired, raising the possibility of a second gunman.Teeter's claims never gained traction in court, but they fed into ongoing skepticism among some legal observers and conspiracy theorists. Over the years, Sirhan has repeatedly sought parole, asserting he was manipulated and does not remember the events of the assassination. Most recently, in March 2023, a California parole board again denied his release, citing concerns over public safety and lack of full accountability.The legal legacy of the case is complex, entangling questions of criminal justice, political violence, and the integrity of forensic evidence. It remains one of the most controversial political assassinations in U.S. history.A long-running legal battle over the rights to Superman has taken a new turn as the estate of co-creator Joe Shuster attempts to block the release of an upcoming film in several foreign markets. In a January 2025 lawsuit, executor Mark Warren Peary argued that copyright laws in the U.K., Canada, Australia, and Ireland revert rights to heirs 25 years after the author's death, potentially invalidating the original 1938 agreement with DC's predecessor. This suit follows a 2023 federal ruling in Vetter v. Resnik that disrupted long-standing entertainment industry consensus by suggesting there is no separate category for foreign rights under the Berne Convention—meaning U.S. termination rights may apply globally.This theory directly challenges a 2008 Superman-related decision that limited termination to U.S. rights. Judge Shelly Dick's 2024 ruling supported the broader reading of termination rights, asserting that foreign copyright protections of U.S. works “arise under” U.S. law. Her opinion dismisses prior case law and scholar-backed consensus as insufficiently grounded. Legal experts are split on the implications, with some praising the reasoning as well-founded, while others see significant obstacles to enforcement abroad.Peary's effort is hampered by delays—he brought the suit years after the alleged 2017 rights reversion—and by the steep burden of proving irreparable harm. Critics also question whether foreign courts will honor a U.S. ruling. The legal strategy comes as Superman is set to enter the public domain within the next decade, prompting what some view as a final attempt by Shuster's estate to reclaim financial control of the iconic character.Superman IP Fight Turns on Newly Questioned Foreign Rights CanonTwo U.S. federal judges have extended temporary blocks on the deportation of Venezuelan migrants and questioned the Trump administration's use of a centuries-old wartime law to expedite removals. President Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in a March 15 proclamation to deport individuals allegedly affiliated with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, sending many to a high-security prison in El Salvador under a $6 million deal with President Nayib Bukele's government. However, U.S. District Judges Charlotte Sweeney in Colorado and Alvin Hellerstein in New York signaled that this use of the law likely violates due process rights.Judge Sweeney ruled that migrants detained in Colorado must receive at least 21 days' notice before deportation, while Judge Hellerstein suggested a minimum of 10 days in his Manhattan hearing. Hellerstein also raised constitutional concerns, referencing the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment and questioning the legality of mass deportations without individual review. The Supreme Court recently ruled that migrants must have the opportunity to challenge deportation but left specifics undefined.Attorneys for the migrants, represented by the ACLU, argued that the Alien Enemies Act shouldn't apply, as no formal war exists, and Tren de Aragua's presence doesn't constitute one. The ACLU also sought a 30-day notice period, consistent with practices during WWII when the law was last broadly applied. Meanwhile, another case revealed that a Salvadoran man had been mistakenly deported, prompting a federal judge in Maryland to demand documentation on the government's efforts to correct the error.Judges extend Venezuela deportation blocks, question Trump's use of wartime law | ReutersThe European Union fined Apple €500 million ($570 million) and Meta €200 million ($228 million) for breaching the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a landmark law aimed at reining in the dominance of Big Tech. These penalties mark the first enforcement actions under the DMA, which seeks to promote competition by requiring dominant platforms to remove barriers for smaller rivals. Apple was penalized for restricting app developers from directing users to cheaper alternatives outside the App Store and for imposing disincentives, such as its new “Core Technology Fee,” that discourage the use of alternative app distribution channels on iOS.Meta's violation centered on its “pay-or-consent” model, which offered users either free, ad-supported access to Facebook and Instagram with data tracking or a paid, ad-free version. Regulators determined this structure did not comply with the DMA's requirements for user consent and fairness. Both companies have two months to adjust their practices or face daily fines. While Apple and Meta criticized the rulings—claiming they unfairly target U.S. companies—EU officials emphasized that all firms operating in Europe must respect local rules.The fines are relatively small compared to previous EU antitrust actions, reflecting a strategic shift toward compliance over punishment and a possible effort to avoid inflaming U.S.-EU trade tensions. The U.S. administration under President Donald Trump has already voiced displeasure with European crackdowns on American tech firms and has threatened retaliatory tariffs.Apple fined $570 million and Meta $228 million for breach of EU law | Reuters This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

Chapter 11: Special Issues in Property Law – Summary. Chapter 11 explores several complex and specialized aspects of property law, focusing on how legal rules governing property interact with issues like marriage, estate planning, bankruptcy, and international considerations. These topics are crucial for understanding the broader implications of property ownership and transfers under specific circumstances. In community property states, property acquired during marriage is considered jointly owned by both spouses, regardless of who earned the income or purchased the assets. The chapter details how community property laws govern the ownership and division of assets in marriage, with a particular focus on: Equal Ownership: Each spouse holds an equal share of any property acquired during the marriage. Separate Property: Assets owned before marriage or obtained through gifts or inheritance remain separate. Division upon Divorce or Death: Community property is divided equally upon divorce or may be passed to heirs when a spouse dies. The chapter also explores variations in community property laws across different jurisdictions, as well as the role of prenuptial and postnuptial agreements in defining marital property rights. Trusts are a key tool in estate planning, allowing property to be managed and distributed according to the wishes of the grantor. This section outlines the different types of trusts, including revocable and irrevocable trusts, and their use in efficiently managing assets, avoiding probate, and offering tax advantages. Key points include: Revocable Trusts: These can be changed or revoked during the grantor's lifetime, offering flexibility in estate planning. Irrevocable Trusts: Once established, these trusts cannot be altered, providing stronger asset protection and potential tax benefits. Trustee's Role: The trustee has a fiduciary responsibility to manage trust assets for the beneficiaries' benefit. Trusts play a crucial role in estate planning, enabling smooth asset distribution and helping to avoid the time-consuming and expensive probate process. When individuals or businesses file for bankruptcy, property rights and creditor claims are governed by bankruptcy laws. This section explains how property is handled in bankruptcy proceedings, including: Exemptions: Certain types of property, such as a primary residence or retirement accounts, may be protected from creditors. Automatic Stay: Bankruptcy initiates an automatic stay, halting foreclosure, repossession, and other collection activities while the bankruptcy is being processed. Role of the Bankruptcy Trustee: The trustee manages the debtor's non-exempt property, liquidating assets to repay creditors. The chapter also contrasts the treatment of property in Chapter 7 (liquidation) and Chapter 13 (restructuring) bankruptcies, highlighting how different types of bankruptcy affect the retention or sale of property. International property law adds layers of complexity to cross-border transactions and IP protection. This section delves into the challenges and legal requirements of owning property and managing intellectual property rights across different jurisdictions. Key issues include: Foreign Ownership Restrictions: Some countries impose limits on foreign ownership of land or property, especially in sensitive areas like coastal or border regions. Cross-Border Property Transactions: Transactions involving foreign property must adhere to both domestic laws and any applicable international treaties, and they often involve complex tax and registration issues. International IP Treaties: Intellectual property rights are often protected through international treaties like the Berne Convention for copyrights and the Paris Convention for industrial property. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/law-school/support

Chapter 11: Special Issues in Property Law – Summary. Chapter 11 explores several complex and specialized aspects of property law, focusing on how legal rules governing property interact with issues like marriage, estate planning, bankruptcy, and international considerations. These topics are crucial for understanding the broader implications of property ownership and transfers under specific circumstances. In community property states, property acquired during marriage is considered jointly owned by both spouses, regardless of who earned the income or purchased the assets. The chapter details how community property laws govern the ownership and division of assets in marriage, with a particular focus on: Equal Ownership: Each spouse holds an equal share of any property acquired during the marriage. Separate Property: Assets owned before marriage or obtained through gifts or inheritance remain separate. Division upon Divorce or Death: Community property is divided equally upon divorce or may be passed to heirs when a spouse dies. The chapter also explores variations in community property laws across different jurisdictions, as well as the role of prenuptial and postnuptial agreements in defining marital property rights. Trusts are a key tool in estate planning, allowing property to be managed and distributed according to the wishes of the grantor. This section outlines the different types of trusts, including revocable and irrevocable trusts, and their use in efficiently managing assets, avoiding probate, and offering tax advantages. Key points include: Revocable Trusts: These can be changed or revoked during the grantor's lifetime, offering flexibility in estate planning. Irrevocable Trusts: Once established, these trusts cannot be altered, providing stronger asset protection and potential tax benefits. Trustee's Role: The trustee has a fiduciary responsibility to manage trust assets for the beneficiaries' benefit. Trusts play a crucial role in estate planning, enabling smooth asset distribution and helping to avoid the time-consuming and expensive probate process. When individuals or businesses file for bankruptcy, property rights and creditor claims are governed by bankruptcy laws. This section explains how property is handled in bankruptcy proceedings, including: Exemptions: Certain types of property, such as a primary residence or retirement accounts, may be protected from creditors. Automatic Stay: Bankruptcy initiates an automatic stay, halting foreclosure, repossession, and other collection activities while the bankruptcy is being processed. Role of the Bankruptcy Trustee: The trustee manages the debtor's non-exempt property, liquidating assets to repay creditors. The chapter also contrasts the treatment of property in Chapter 7 (liquidation) and Chapter 13 (restructuring) bankruptcies, highlighting how different types of bankruptcy affect the retention or sale of property. International property law adds layers of complexity to cross-border transactions and IP protection. This section delves into the challenges and legal requirements of owning property and managing intellectual property rights across different jurisdictions. Key issues include: Foreign Ownership Restrictions: Some countries impose limits on foreign ownership of land or property, especially in sensitive areas like coastal or border regions. Cross-Border Property Transactions: Transactions involving foreign property must adhere to both domestic laws and any applicable international treaties, and they often involve complex tax and registration issues. International IP Treaties: Intellectual property rights are often protected through international treaties like the Berne Convention for copyrights and the Paris Convention for industrial property. Navigating the diverse legal frameworks in different countries is essential for securing property rights and ensuring compliance with international agreements. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/law-school/support

Chapter 11: Special Issues in Property Law – Summary. Chapter 11 explores several complex and specialized aspects of property law, focusing on how legal rules governing property interact with issues like marriage, estate planning, bankruptcy, and international considerations. These topics are crucial for understanding the broader implications of property ownership and transfers under specific circumstances. In community property states, property acquired during marriage is considered jointly owned by both spouses, regardless of who earned the income or purchased the assets. The chapter details how community property laws govern the ownership and division of assets in marriage, with a particular focus on: Equal Ownership: Each spouse holds an equal share of any property acquired during the marriage. Separate Property: Assets owned before marriage or obtained through gifts or inheritance remain separate. Division upon Divorce or Death: Community property is divided equally upon divorce or may be passed to heirs when a spouse dies. The chapter also explores variations in community property laws across different jurisdictions, as well as the role of prenuptial and postnuptial agreements in defining marital property rights. Trusts are a key tool in estate planning, allowing property to be managed and distributed according to the wishes of the grantor. This section outlines the different types of trusts, including revocable and irrevocable trusts, and their use in efficiently managing assets, avoiding probate, and offering tax advantages. Key points include: Revocable Trusts: These can be changed or revoked during the grantor's lifetime, offering flexibility in estate planning. Irrevocable Trusts: Once established, these trusts cannot be altered, providing stronger asset protection and potential tax benefits. Trustee's Role: The trustee has a fiduciary responsibility to manage trust assets for the beneficiaries' benefit. Trusts play a crucial role in estate planning, enabling smooth asset distribution and helping to avoid the time-consuming and expensive probate process. When individuals or businesses file for bankruptcy, property rights and creditor claims are governed by bankruptcy laws. This section explains how property is handled in bankruptcy proceedings, including: Exemptions: Certain types of property, such as a primary residence or retirement accounts, may be protected from creditors. Automatic Stay: Bankruptcy initiates an automatic stay, halting foreclosure, repossession, and other collection activities while the bankruptcy is being processed. Role of the Bankruptcy Trustee: The trustee manages the debtor's non-exempt property, liquidating assets to repay creditors. The chapter also contrasts the treatment of property in Chapter 7 (liquidation) and Chapter 13 (restructuring) bankruptcies, highlighting how different types of bankruptcy affect the retention or sale of property. International property law adds layers of complexity to cross-border transactions and IP protection. This section delves into the challenges and legal requirements of owning property and managing intellectual property rights across different jurisdictions. Key issues include: Foreign Ownership Restrictions: Some countries impose limits on foreign ownership of land or property, especially in sensitive areas like coastal or border regions. Cross-Border Property Transactions: Transactions involving foreign property must adhere to both domestic laws and any applicable international treaties, and they often involve complex tax and registration issues. International IP Treaties: Intellectual property rights are often protected through international treaties like the Berne Convention for copyrights and the Paris Convention for industrial property. Navigating the diverse legal frameworks in different countries is essential for securing property rights and ensuring compliance with international agreements. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/law-school/support

In this episode, Dr. Melissa Omino is joined by Dr. Desmond Oriakhogba, an Associate Professor at The University of the Western Cape. Dr. Oriakhogba is an expert in Intellectual Property and Competition Law. Dr. Omino and Dr. Oriakhogba have an in-depth discussion on Dr. Oriakhogba's book, The Right to Research in Africa: Exploring the Interface between Copyright and Human Rights. The book explores the intersection and manifestation of tensions between intellectual property rights and human rights, focusing on the conflict between Copyright and the Right to Research in light of the African context.The book has five chapters and is written in accessible language. It is framed to target a broad audience, offering insights for law and policymakers, judges, lawyers, researchers, students, and the general public.ResourcesAudio Home Recording Act (AHRA) of 1992 (the "Sony Act")https://www.congress.gov/bill/102nd-congress/senate-bill/1623/textSony Corp. of Am. v. Universal City Studios, Inc. in 1984https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/summaries/sonycorp-universal-1984.pdf  Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Workshttps://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%20828/volume-828-I-11850-English.pdf  The Right to Research-Arjun Appadurahttps://docs.ufpr.br/~clarissa/pdfs/Research_AppaduraiA.pdf  Why Intellectual Property and Pandemics Don't Mixhttps://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-intellectual-property-and-pandemics-dont-mix/  General Comment No. 25 (2020) On Article 15: Science and Economic, Social and Cultural Rightshttps://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/general-comments-and-recommendations/general-comment-no-25-2020-article-15-science-and  AU Agenda 2063 https://au.int/en/agenda2063/sdgs#:~:text=and%20children's%20rights-,4.,empower%20all%20women%20and%20girls.  Springer Briefs In Law Serieshttps://www.springer.com/series/10164   

Chapter 7 delves into the complexities of international intellectual property (IP) law, exploring the framework of international treaties and conventions, the challenges associated with cross-border enforcement, the roles played by global organizations like the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and provides case studies that illustrate these dynamics in action. International Treaties and Conventions International treaties and conventions provide a foundational framework for the protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights across national borders. These agreements aim to harmonize the protection of intellectual property worldwide, making it easier for countries to cooperate and for rights holders to secure and enforce their rights internationally. Key International Treaties include: The Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property (1883): One of the first intellectual property treaties, establishing important principles such as national treatment, right of priority, and independence of patents granted in different countries. The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886): Establishes protections for creators of literary and artistic works, ensuring they receive rights in all signatory countries as they do in their own. The Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) (1970): Streamlines the filing of patents in multiple countries by allowing for a single "international" patent application. The Madrid System for the International Registration of Marks: Facilitates the registration of trademarks in multiple jurisdictions around the world through a single application. The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) (1994): Administered by the World Trade Organization (WTO), TRIPS sets down minimum standards for many forms of intellectual property regulation that WTO members must comply with. Cross-border Enforcement Challenges Enforcing IP rights across national borders presents significant challenges. Differences in national laws, the resources available for enforcement, and the political and economic climate can all impact the effectiveness of IP protection internationally. Challenges include: Variability in Legal Frameworks: Even with international treaties, countries implement and interpret intellectual property laws differently, leading to inconsistencies that can complicate enforcement. Jurisdictional Issues: Determining which country's laws apply, and where legal action should be taken, can be complex and hinder the efficiency of enforcement actions. Counterfeiting and Piracy: These issues are particularly rampant in countries with less stringent enforcement of IP laws, making it difficult for rights holders to protect their interests. Role of WIPO and Other International Organizations WIPO plays a critical role in the international intellectual property system. As a specialized agency of the United Nations, WIPO facilitates international cooperation in the creation and protection of intellectual property. It administers several international treaties, offers dispute resolution services, and helps developing countries build their capacity to use intellectual property for economic development. Other significant organizations include: World Trade Organization (WTO): Manages the TRIPS agreement which affects how intellectual property is handled in trade agreements between member states. European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and similar regional bodies: Manage trademarks and designs within their respective regions, facilitating simpler processes for registration and enforcement across multiple countries. Case Studies of International IP Disputes Apple Inc. vs. Samsung Electronics Co.: This series of ongoing legal battles across multiple countries highlights issues with patent infringement and showcases how multinational companies protect their IP across different legal systems. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/law-school/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/law-school/support

International Intellectual Property Law Chapter 7 delves into the complexities of international intellectual property (IP) law, exploring the framework of international treaties and conventions, the challenges associated with cross-border enforcement, the roles played by global organizations like the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and provides case studies that illustrate these dynamics in action. International Treaties and Conventions International treaties and conventions provide a foundational framework for the protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights across national borders. These agreements aim to harmonize the protection of intellectual property worldwide, making it easier for countries to cooperate and for rights holders to secure and enforce their rights internationally. Key International Treaties include: The Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property (1883): One of the first intellectual property treaties, establishing important principles such as national treatment, right of priority, and independence of patents granted in different countries. The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886): Establishes protections for creators of literary and artistic works, ensuring they receive rights in all signatory countries as they do in their own. The Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) (1970): Streamlines the filing of patents in multiple countries by allowing for a single "international" patent application. The Madrid System for the International Registration of Marks: Facilitates the registration of trademarks in multiple jurisdictions around the world through a single application. The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) (1994): Administered by the World Trade Organization (WTO), TRIPS sets down minimum standards for many forms of intellectual property regulation that WTO members must comply with. Cross-border Enforcement Challenges Enforcing IP rights across national borders presents significant challenges. Differences in national laws, the resources available for enforcement, and the political and economic climate can all impact the effectiveness of IP protection internationally. Challenges include: Variability in Legal Frameworks: Even with international treaties, countries implement and interpret intellectual property laws differently, leading to inconsistencies that can complicate enforcement. Jurisdictional Issues: Determining which country's laws apply, and where legal action should be taken, can be complex and hinder the efficiency of enforcement actions. Counterfeiting and Piracy: These issues are particularly rampant in countries with less stringent enforcement of IP laws, making it difficult for rights holders to protect their interests. Role of WIPO and Other International Organizations WIPO plays a critical role in the international intellectual property system. As a specialized agency of the United Nations, WIPO facilitates international cooperation in the creation and protection of intellectual property. It administers several international treaties, offers dispute resolution services, and helps developing countries build their capacity to use intellectual property for economic development. Other significant organizations include: World Trade Organization (WTO): Manages the TRIPS agreement which affects how intellectual property is handled in trade agreements between member states. European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and similar regional bodies: Manage trademarks and designs within their respective regions, facilitating simpler processes for registration and enforcement across multiple countries. Case Studies of International IP Disputes Apple Inc. vs. Samsung Electronics Co.: This series of ongoing legal battles across multiple countries highlights issues with patent infringement and showcases how multinational companies protect their IP across different legal systems. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/law-school/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/law-school/support

Regulations and Content Guidelines: a. Broadcast Regulations: FCC The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) oversees and regulates broadcast television and radio in the United States. Rules govern areas such as indecency and profanity, advertising practices, political advertising, and equal time provisions. Broadcasters must comply with content guidelines, including restrictions on obscene, indecent, or profane material during certain hours. b. Content Ratings: Content rating systems, such as TV Parental Guidelines and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) rating system, provide guidance on the suitability of media content for different age groups. Ratings help inform viewers and parents about potentially objectionable content, enabling informed decisions. Censorship, Obscenity, and Free Speech Concerns: a. Obscenity and Indecency Standards: Legal definitions and standards for obscenity and indecency can vary across jurisdictions, impacting the permissible content in media and artistic works. Regulations aim to strike a balance between protecting public decency and upholding free speech rights. b. Artistic Expression and Free Speech: The entertainment industry often navigates the tensions between artistic expression and societal norms or government censorship. Legal protections for free speech and artistic freedom can vary across countries and cultures, influencing the creative process and content distribution. Compliance with Labor Laws and Union Rules: a. Labor Regulations: The entertainment industry must comply with applicable labor laws, including minimum wage requirements, overtime regulations, and workplace safety standards. Specific rules may apply to child actors, stunt performers, and other specialized roles. b. Union Agreements: Unions such as the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), Writers Guild of America (WGA), and Directors Guild of America (DGA) negotiate collective bargaining agreements that govern working conditions, compensation, and benefits for their members. Compliance with union rules is essential for maintaining harmonious labor relations and avoiding potential strikes or legal disputes. Cross-Border Regulations and International Distribution: a. Import/Export Controls: The distribution of media content and artistic works across borders may be subject to import/export controls, censorship, or content restrictions in different countries. Navigating these regulations is crucial for facilitating international distribution and avoiding potential legal or cultural conflicts. b. Intellectual Property Protection: International treaties and agreements, such as the Berne Convention and the TRIPS Agreement, establish frameworks for protecting intellectual property rights across borders. Ensuring compliance with these treaties is essential for safeguarding copyrights, trademarks, and other intellectual property assets in global markets. c. Cultural Considerations: Different cultural norms and sensitivities can influence the acceptability and reception of media content in various regions. Localization efforts, such as dubbing, subtitling, or content editing, may be necessary to adapt to specific cultural contexts and regulatory environments. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/law-school/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/law-school/support

This Day in Legal History: WIPO EstablishedOn April 26, 1970, a significant advancement in the protection and management of intellectual property took place with the establishment of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). This marked the enforcement of the Convention Establishing WIPO, making it one of the specialized agencies under the United Nations focused on intellectual property (IP) issues. WIPO's primary mission is to promote and protect intellectual property across different countries by fostering international cooperation. As of now, 184 countries are signatories to the convention, showcasing a global commitment to the principles laid out by WIPO.WIPO plays a crucial role in the development of a balanced and accessible international IP system, which benefits both creators and the public, thereby contributing to economic, social, and cultural development worldwide. The organization administers 26 international treaties, including the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property and the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. These treaties serve as the backbone for international IP law, standardizing the protection of IP across borders and promoting creative activity globally.WIPO also assists countries in developing their IP strategies and provides a platform for dispute resolution concerning IP. Through its various programs, WIPO enhances the ability of countries to utilize IP for economic development. Additionally, WIPO's efforts include tackling the challenges of IP in relation to new technologies, which continually reshape the boundaries of law and creativity.The creation of WIPO in 1970 was a response to the growing significance of intellectual property in the age of technological and artistic innovation, recognizing the need for a systematic approach to IP issues that transcended national borders. Today, WIPO continues to evolve as it addresses emerging issues in intellectual property influenced by the digital age and globalization, underscoring its ongoing relevance in international legal and economic landscapes.The Supreme Court is currently deliberating on Donald Trump's assertion of immunity from prosecution regarding charges that he illegally tried to remain in power. During a hearing, there was notable skepticism from the justices towards Trump's broad claims of immunity relating to his efforts to overturn the election results of 2020. Chief Justice John Roberts suggested possibly remanding the case back to lower courts for a more detailed examination of the allegations, indicating that the appeals court had not sufficiently scrutinized the specifics of the actions and documents in question.Justice Brett Kavanaugh expressed concerns about the potential long-term implications of making presidents vulnerable to prosecution for their official acts, fearing it could cyclically affect future presidents. Meanwhile, the liberal justices questioned the absence of constitutional immunity for presidents, highlighting the risk of a president acting without fear of legal consequences. Justice Amy Coney Barrett also challenged the idea that former presidents could only be prosecuted post-impeachment.The case underscores the urgency from Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is pressed by time constraints to try Trump before the upcoming election, given that a trial and subsequent conviction could adversely affect Trump's electoral prospects. Trump, facing multiple prosecutions, has argued for absolute immunity for actions taken while in office, which include his conduct leading up to and on January 6th.There are fundamental questions that must be addressed about the scope of presidential power and its limits, which are central to the case's legal and constitutional stakes.Supreme Court Wary of Trump Immunity But May Keep Trial on HoldThe Biden administration's Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Program, a key component of the Inflation Reduction Act aimed at reducing the costs of certain Medicare Part D drugs by 2026, has attracted significant legal attention. Numerous former government officials, scholars, and patient advocacy groups have filed amicus briefs supporting the administration in response to legal challenges from the pharmaceutical industry, which contests the constitutionality of the program.These challenges involve several constitutional claims by the pharmaceutical companies, including violations of compelled speech under the First Amendment, the takings clause and due process under the Fifth Amendment, and excessive fines under the Eighth Amendment. The industry argues that the program unlawfully compels them to sell their products at government-dictated prices without just compensation.However, a notable decision by Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly dismissed AstraZeneca's due process claims, asserting that the manufacturer did not have a constitutional property interest jeopardized by the program. This decision aligns with several key legal precedents cited in various amicus briefs that reinforce the government's position.The case also touches on broader implications for governmental regulatory powers and the limits of constitutional protections for businesses under economic regulation frameworks. Legal experts and scholars have argued that the claims raised by the pharmaceutical industry stretch constitutional interpretations to protect against price negotiation practices that have been historically upheld as constitutional.The legal battle also involves a debate over the First Amendment, with the government asserting that the program does not compel speech from drug manufacturers. Judges and legal experts have scrutinized these claims, emphasizing the potential impact of accepting such an interpretation on a wide range of regulatory activities.While the majority of amicus briefs support the government, a few filed on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry focus on concerns about stifling drug innovation and the severe financial penalties imposed for non-compliance with the program's pricing mandates.The ongoing legal proceedings at the district court level, though less common for amicus filings than higher courts, play a crucial role in shaping the preliminary legal landscape before potentially reaching the Supreme Court. The involvement of high-level legal expertise in the form of amicus briefs underscores the significant stakes and complex legal issues at play, reflecting the profound implications of the outcome on the healthcare sector and regulatory practices.Wave of Amicus Briefs Back Drug Price Plan at Trial Court StageThe EPA's recent final rule under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), commonly known as the Superfund law, designates two PFAS chemicals—perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS)—as hazardous substances. This designation is expected to significantly impact companies responsible for contaminated sites, potentially leading to the reevaluation and cleanup of sites previously considered resolved.The rule aims to address sites contaminated with PFOA and PFOS, which are part of a group of chemicals known as "forever chemicals" due to their persistence in the environment. Currently, only a small fraction of National Priorities List (NPL) sites have been identified as contaminated with these substances, but this number is expected to rise as more comprehensive testing is implemented. The EPA's action follows increasing evidence of the health risks associated with high concentrations of these chemicals, including potential links to cancer and other serious health issues.Companies and other entities responsible for releases of these chemicals will face new reporting requirements if they release one pound or more of PFOA or PFOS within a 24-hour period. These reports will contribute to the Toxics Release Inventory and are part of broader efforts to increase transparency and regulatory oversight regarding PFAS releases into the environment.The designation of PFOA and PFOS as hazardous substances under CERCLA is likely to lead to significant legal and financial implications for responsible parties due to the costly nature of cleanup efforts and potential litigation. Moreover, the rule's implications extend beyond immediate cleanup efforts, potentially impacting water utilities and prompting them to seek remediation and accountability from polluters as stricter limits on PFAS in tap water are set to take effect.This regulatory change reflects a growing recognition of the serious environmental and health impacts of PFAS chemicals, and it aligns with broader environmental justice efforts to address pollution exposure disparities among racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups. The long-term challenges of managing PFAS contamination will involve complex legal, environmental, and public health considerations, particularly as affected communities and regulatory agencies navigate the implications of these pervasive pollutants.New PFAS Designation Expected to Spark Rise in Superfund SitesHarvey Weinstein's 2020 conviction for sexual assault and rape was overturned by New York's highest court on April 25, 2024. The court, in a closely contested 4-3 decision, cited critical errors by the trial judge, particularly in allowing testimony about alleged assaults that were not directly related to the charges Weinstein faced. This decision has reignited discussions about the challenges in prosecuting powerful figures and has been met with dismay by many, including actress Ashley Judd, who viewed it as an institutional betrayal.The Manhattan District Attorney's office, led by Alvin Bragg, has indicated plans to retry the case, underscoring their ongoing commitment to addressing sexual assault. The overturned conviction, which had been a significant victory for the #MeToo movement, involved allegations by Miriam Haley and Jessica Mann that dated back to 2006 and 2013, respectively.Weinstein's legal team celebrated the decision as a triumph for justice, noting Weinstein's relief and resilience despite his ongoing incarceration. He remains imprisoned on a separate 16-year sentence in California for similar charges, which stands unaffected by the New York ruling.This case has had broad implications, influencing legislation and public awareness about sexual misconduct. New York, among other states, has passed laws allowing civil lawsuits for sexual misconduct outside the typical statutes of limitations, reflecting a legislative response to #MeToo. The case's developments continue to be closely watched, with potential impacts on both legal precedents and societal norms concerning accountability for sexual violence.Harvey Weinstein's rape conviction is overturned by top New York court | ReutersThe defamation lawsuit filed by Jack and Leslie Flynn against CNN, which involved claims of being wrongfully associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory, has been dismissed by a judge. The case revolved around a CNN segment that showed the Flynns at a barbecue raising their hands while Michael Flynn, the former National Security Advisor, recited a phrase linked to QAnon. The Flynns argued that this portrayal falsely labeled them as QAnon followers, which they considered defamatory.CNN countered that the phrase "where we go one, we go all" used by Michael Flynn during the event is widely recognized as associated with QAnon, and that the Flynns were visible participants in the event. The court, upon review, determined that the term "QAnon followers" as used in the context of the CNN segment is a non-defamatory opinion, not a statement of fact. The judge ruled that opinions, especially when based on disclosed, non-defamatory facts, do not constitute defamation.Furthermore, the court highlighted that the portrayal of the Flynns in the segment was based on their actual appearance and participation in an event alongside Michael Flynn, which is not disputed by the Flynns. The dismissal reflects judicial recognition of the challenges in proving defamation when the statements in question are based on interpreted opinions rather than explicit facts. The decision underscores the importance of context in defamation cases, particularly when public figures and political movements are involved. This case also reflects ongoing legal debates about the limits of free speech and the scope of media responsibility in reporting on controversial public figures and events.Flynn Family's SLAPP Suit Against CNN Slapped Down By Judge | TechdirtThis week's closing theme is by Ludwig van Beethoven.For this week's closing piece of classical music, where we will once again delve into the towering genius of Ludwig van Beethoven and his monumental Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat major, Op. 106, known as the "Hammerklavier." Composed in 1819, the "Hammerklavier" Sonata stands as one of the pinnacles of Beethoven's creative output and showcases his profound depth in musical structure and expressive range.This sonata is particularly renowned for its technical difficulty and ambitious scope, pushing the boundaries of the piano sonata form of the time. Beethoven's late period, during which he composed the "Hammerklavier," is marked by an increased use of complex structures and an exploration of new musical ideas, and this sonata is a testament to his innovative spirit.This week, we will focus specifically on the second movement of this sonata, the Scherzo: Assai vivace. In stark contrast to the grandiose and deeply serious first movement, the Scherzo bursts with energy and playfulness. Its rapid tempo and lively rhythms present a dazzling display of technical prowess and artistic flair. This movement is a brilliant example of Beethoven's ability to juxtapose contrasting moods within a single piece, providing a refreshing and exhilarating counterpart to the sonata's more introspective segments.The Scherzo is structured around a lively theme that leaps and dances across the keyboard, filled with syncopated rhythms and sudden dynamic changes that challenge even the most skilled pianists. It embodies a sense of joy and almost mischievous playfulness, showcasing Beethoven's mastery in transforming musical ideas into a vivid emotional narrative.As we close this week's episode with the Scherzo from Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata, let the vivacity and brilliance of this music inspire you. It serves not only as a showcase of Beethoven's technical mastery but also his undiminished spirit and the enduring power of his music to evoke a wide range of profound emotions. Enjoy the spirited journey through one of the most challenging yet rewarding pieces in the piano repertoire.Without further ado, Beethoven's Piano Sonata no. 29 “Hammerklavier”, Op. 106 - II. Scherzo - Assai vivace. Get full access to Minimum Competence - Daily Legal News Podcast at www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

Copyright law's journey begins in the early days of printing technology. The Stationers' Company in 16th century England was granted the power by the Crown to control the printing and distribution of books, ostensibly to prevent sedition and heresy but also to establish a trade monopoly for its members. This early form of copyright was more about controlling the printing press than protecting authors' rights. It wasn't until the enactment of the Statute of Anne in 1710 that copyright law began to recognize the rights of authors and creators, providing them with a limited monopoly (initially 14 years) to print and sell their works. The 19th and 20th centuries saw significant developments as nations began to recognize the need for copyright protection beyond their borders. The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works of 1886 marked a pivotal moment, establishing principles that underpin international copyright law today, such as automatic protection and protection that is independent of formalities. This convention, which now includes the vast majority of the world's nations, fundamentally changed how copyright works internationally, emphasizing the importance of protecting authors' rights across borders. In the 20th century, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) was established to promote and protect intellectual property worldwide. The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), part of the World Trade Organization's framework, further harmonized copyright laws globally, mandating minimum standards of protection and enforcement. Purpose and Rationale. The dual objectives of copyright law—to encourage the creation of art, culture, and knowledge while providing economic rights to creators—serve as its foundation. From a philosophical standpoint, copyright law balances the interests of creators and the public. By granting creators exclusive rights to their works for a limited time, the law incentivizes the creation and dissemination of new works, enriching society's cultural and knowledge base. After this period, works enter the public domain, where they can be freely accessed and used by anyone, fostering further creativity and innovation. Economically, copyright provides a mechanism for creators to monetize their work, whether through sales, licensing, or other forms of distribution. This financial incentive is crucial for ensuring that creators can sustain themselves and continue their creative endeavors. Moreover, copyright law supports the infrastructure of creative industries, from publishing to music and film, contributing significantly to national and global economies. However, copyright law is not without its critics and challenges. The digital age has amplified these challenges, with the ease of copying and distributing copyrighted material online leading to widespread infringement issues. Debates over copyright duration, fair use, digital rights management, and the balance between protecting creators and ensuring public access to information are ongoing. The evolution of copyright law reflects a continuous effort to balance these competing interests. As technology advances and societal values shift, copyright law adapts, aiming to fulfill its dual objectives while responding to new realities. The future of copyright will undoubtedly involve further debates and adjustments as we strive to maintain this delicate balance in a rapidly changing world. Defining Copyright Subject Matter Copyright law protects a wide range of original works of authorship, reflecting the diverse ways human creativity manifests. Each category of work protected under copyright law encompasses a broad array of expressions: --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/law-school/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/law-school/support

Happy Monday! Sam and Emma speak with David Bellos, professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, to discuss his recent book Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs, co-authored with Alexandre Montagu. First, Sam and Emma run through updates on Israel's targeting of Al-Shifa hospital, the false UNRWA accusations, Russian elections, US realtors, SCOTUS, the sale of US Steel, the Federal Reserve, and Donald Trump's legal woes, before parsing through objections from US representatives to the continued commitment to Israel's obvious lies about UNRWA. Professor David Bellos then joins, diving right into the contemporary distinctions between patents, trademarks, and the monstrous world of copyright, with the former two requiring applications and reapplications, while copyright allows for extensive, long-term monopoly over intellectual property for both individuals and corporations. After briefly touching on the concept of intellectual property writ large, Professor Bellos steps back to look at the initially parallel histories of patents and copyright, both birthed alongside the creation and dissemination of the printing press in 15th Century Venice to provide a distinction between the limited ownership of newly-authored works and the public domain of older and classical art, also touching on the much longer (and more severe) history of trademarks stretching back through the medieval times. Moving forward, Bellos then walks Sam and Emma through how the evolution of the world of intellectual property over the 18th and 19th Centuries largely took place in Western Europe, with Paris and London leading the way to the 1886 Berne Convention while other Western states like the US seriously lagged, also touching on the lack of ideology or even rationality behind the slow but steady expansion of these rights, before parsing through the US' 180º turn on intellectual property over the 20th Century as they came into their hegemonic station, not only signing onto Berne but forcing anyone who wanted help from the Neoliberal order to do so as well. Following a conversation on the particularly astounding role of employer or corporate ownership over intellectual property, they wrap up the interview with an assessment of IP's role in stifling creativity, how major media companies would react to a complete overhaul of IP law, and what ideal reforms to IP would look like. Sam and Emma also update us on the Aldaghma family's escape from Gaza. And in the Fun Half: Sam and Emma watch Bibi Netanyahu's response to Senator Schumer's call for new Israeli elections, John from San Antonio previews some of the biggest primary races in tomorrow's elections and touches on progressives' failures in California, and the MR Crew parses through the highlights from Donald Trump's insane rally for Bernie Moreno in Ohio – including an appearance from the January 6th Choir, and the differing responses to Trump's “bloodbath” comments and his comments on migrants not being people. Fox works to normalize Trump's actively genocidal rhetoric, Jo Snuffy and Kathy from South Dakota dive into the Biden Administration plan for a temporary aid port in Gaza, and Boeing's controversies grow as a whistleblower is found dead, plus, your calls and IMs! Check out David's book here: https://fit.princeton.edu/publications/who-owns-sentence-history-copyrights-and-wrongs Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com: https://fans.fm/majority/join Check out Seder's Seeds here!: https://www.sedersseeds.com/ ; use coupon code Majority and get 15% off; ALSO, if you have pictures of your Seder's Seeds, send them here!: hello@sedersseeds.com Check out, and share friend of the show Janek Ambros's new documentary for The Nation, "Ukrainians in Exile" here!: https://twitter.com/thenation/status/1760681194382119399?s=20 Check out this GoFundMe in support of Mohammad Aldaghma's niece in Gaza, who has Down Syndrome: http://tinyurl.com/7zb4hujt Check out the "Repair Gaza" campaign courtesy of the Glia Project here: https://www.launchgood.com/campaign/rebuild_gaza_help_repair_and_rebuild_the_lives_and_work_of_our_glia_team#!/ Get emails on the IRS pilot program for tax filing here!: https://service.govdelivery.com/accounts/USIRS/subscriber/new Check out StrikeAid here!; https://strikeaid.com/ Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the ESVN YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/esvnshow Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! http://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: http://majority.fm/app Check out today's sponsors: Earthbreeze: Right now, my listeners can receive 40% off Earth Breeze just by going to https://earthbreeze.com/majority! That's https://earthbreeze.com/majority to cut out single-use plastic in your laundry room and claim 40% off your subscription. Aura Frames: Right now, you can save on the perfect gift that keeps on giving by visiting https://AuraFrames.com. For a limited time, listeners can get 20 dollars off their best-selling frame with code MAJORITY. That's https://AuraFrames.com promo code MAJORITY. Sunset Lake CBD: Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech @BradKAlsop Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on Youtube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out Ava Raiza's music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.com/ The Majority Report with Sam Seder - https://majorityreportradio.com/

Write for Rights: Why we should care about Kyrgyzstan15 years in prison for peacefully protesting…In today's short story, journalist Mathilda Mallinson meets a human rights defender whose plight unites us across borders. She faces imprisonment in a secluded mountainous country that lies at a crucial juncture between Asia and Europe. As the forces against her take root around the world, there's one key takeaway: she could be you.Find out why Rita's story matters to you, and what you can do to help.The episode is hosted by Mathilda Mallinson (@mathildamall) and features music by Samfire (@soundofsamfire). Learn more at amnesty.org.uk.Note on translation: The performance of conference interpreters is protected under international law, with the Berne Convention providing protection for the interests of authors. In the context of an interpreted event, interpreters are the owners of their interpretations and therefore have exclusive rights over the recording of their work. Due to the spontaneous nature of simultaneous interpreting, the recording of an interpreted event can only ever be used for information purposes and does not serve as the official version of the communication. You can also get an ad-free version of the podcast via Apple Podcasts or Acast+ https://plus.acast.com/s/guiltyfeminist. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Vondran Legal® - VARA Copyright Law Firm - Kerson vs. Vermont Law School - the Underground Railroad Mural.  If you have a legal issue involving art law, paintings, scultpures or illustrations, call us at (877) 276-5084. The Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA) is a United States copyright law that was enacted in 1990. It was introduced to protect visual artists and their artwork from destruction, mutilation, or modification that could harm an artist's honor or reputation. VARA grants certain rights to artists, including the right to prevent the destruction, distortion, or modification of their artwork, and the right to be credited as the author of their works. The history of VARA can be traced back to the early 20th century when modern art movements like Cubism and Surrealism emerged. These groundbreaking art forms challenged traditional notions of representation and pushed the boundaries of artistic expression. However, artists often faced significant criticism, and their works were sometimes destroyed or modified without their consent, leading to infringement of their artistic integrity. In response to such incidents, artists and art collectors began advocating for legal protection of an artist's moral rights, which had been recognized in some European countries. Moral rights refer to an artist's non-economic rights, such as the right to claim authorship and to prevent the distortion or modification of their work. The concept of moral rights was enshrined in the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works in 1928, which established international copyright standards.      

Fair dealing is a limitation and exception to the exclusive rights granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. Fair dealing is found in many of the common law jurisdictions of the Commonwealth of Nations. Fair dealing is an enumerated set of possible defenses against an action for infringement of an exclusive right of copyright. Unlike the related United States doctrine of fair use, fair dealing cannot apply to any act which does not fall within one of these categories, although common law courts in some jurisdictions are less stringent than others in this regard. In practice, however, such courts might rule that actions with a commercial character, which might be naïvely assumed to fall into one of these categories, were in fact infringements of copyright, as fair dealing is not as flexible a concept as the American concept of fair use. There are similar limitations and exceptions to copyright, such as the right to quote, also in the Berne Convention and in the laws of civil law jurisdictions. By country. United States. The parallel concept in United States copyright law is fair use. The term "fair dealing" has a different meaning in the U.S. It is a duty of full disclosure imposed upon corporate officers, fiduciaries, and parties to contracts. In the reported cases, it usually arises in the context of the "implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing", which underlies the tort cause of action for insurance bad faith. Canada. The Canadian concept of fair dealing is similar to that in the UK and Australia. The fair dealing clauses of the Canadian Copyright Act allow users to engage in certain activities relating to research, private study, education, parody, satire, criticism, review, or news reporting. With respect to criticism, review, and news reporting, the user must mention the source of the material, along with the name of the author, performer, maker, or broadcaster for the dealing to be fair. Prior to 2011, fair dealing in Canada was not definitely found to contain exceptions for parody (unlike fair use in the United States), but the Copyright Act has since been amended to include parody and satire (along with educational use) under its fair dealing provisions. Previously, a Quebec Court of Appeal in Les productions Avanti Cine Video v Favreau (4 August 1999) had recognized that parody could potentially be a 'critique', but it refused to recognize the exception in that circumstance. The 2004 ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada in CCH Canadian Limited v Law Society of Upper Canada has gone far in clarifying the concept of fair dealing in Canada. In considering fair dealing the Court makes the following general observation: It is important to clarify some general considerations about exceptions to copyright infringement. Procedurally, a defendant is required to prove that his or her dealing with a work has been fair; however, the fair dealing exception is perhaps more properly understood as an integral part of the Copyright Act than simply a defense. Any act falling within the fair dealing exception will not be an infringement of copyright. The fair dealing exception, like other exceptions in the Copyright Act, is a user's right. In order to maintain the proper balance between the rights of a copyright owner and users' interests, it must not be interpreted restrictively. Furthermore, by taking "a liberal approach to the enumerated purposes of the dealing", the Court has made fair dealing more flexible, reducing the gap between this provision and US fair use. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/law-school/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/law-school/support

Those who oppose these practices argue that distribution denies the copyright holder potential sales, in the form of re-released titles, official emulation, and so on. Likewise, they argue that if people can acquire an old version of a program for free, they may be less likely to purchase a newer version if the old version meets their needs. From game developers with sympathy with abandonware. Some game developers showed sympathy for abandonware websites as they preserve their classical game titles. In this quote Richard Garriott states, “Personally, I think that sites that support these old games are a good thing for both consumers and copyright owners. If the options are (a) having a game be lost forever and (b) having it available on one of these sites, I'd want it to be available. That being said, I believe a game is 'abandoned' only long after it is out of print. And just because a book is out of print does not give me rights to print some for my friends.” In this quote Tim Schafer states, “Is it piracy? Yeah, sure. But so what? Most of the game makers aren't living off the revenue from those old games anymore. Most of the creative teams behind all those games have long since left the companies that published them, so there's no way the people who deserve to are still making royalties off them. So go ahead—steal this game! Spread the love!” In this quote Chris Taylor states, “If I owned the copyright on Total Annihilation, I would probably allow it to be shared for free by now (four years after it was originally released)” Law. In most cases, software classed as abandonware is not in the public domain, as it has never had its original copyright officially revoked and some company or individual may still own rights. While sharing of such software is usually considered copyright infringement, in practice copyright holders rarely enforce their abandonware copyrights for a number of reasons – chiefly among which the software is technologically obsolete and therefore has no commercial value, therefore rendering copyright enforcement a pointless enterprise. By default, this may allow the product to de facto lapse into the public domain to such an extent that enforcement becomes impractical. Rarely has any abandonware case gone to court, but it is still unlawful to distribute copies of old copyrighted software and games, with or without compensation, in any Berne Convention signatory country. Enforcement of copyright. Old copyrights are usually left undefended. This can be due to intentional non-enforcement by owners due to software age or obsolescence, but sometimes results from a corporate copyright holder going out of business without explicitly transferring ownership, leaving no one aware of the right to defend the copyright. Even if the copyright is not defended, copying of such software is still unlawful in most jurisdictions when a copyright is still in effect. Abandonware changes hands on the assumption that the resources required to enforce copyrights outweigh benefits a copyright holder might realize from selling software licenses. Additionally, abandonware proponents argue that distributing software for which there is no one to defend the copyright is morally acceptable, even where unsupported by current law. Companies that have gone out of business without transferring their copyrights are an example of this; many hardware and software companies that developed older systems are long since out of business and precise documentation of the copyrights may not be readily available. Often the availability of abandonware on the Internet is related to the willingness of copyright holders to defend their copyrights. For example, unencumbered games for Colecovision are markedly easier to find on the Internet than unencumbered games for Mattel Intellivision in large part because there is still a company that sells Intellivision games while no such company exists for the Colecovision. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/law-school/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/law-school/support

In copyright law, related rights (or neighboring rights) are the rights of a creative work not connected with the work's actual author. It is used in opposition to the term "authors' rights". Neighboring rights is a more literal translation of the original French droits voisins. Both authors' rights and related rights are copyrights in the sense of English or U.S. law. Related rights vary much more widely in scope between different countries than authors' rights. The rights of performers, phonogram producers and broadcasting organizations are certainly covered, and are internationally protected by the Rome Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organisations signed in 1961. Within the European Union, the rights of film producers (as opposed to directors) and database creators are also protected by related rights, and the term is sometimes extended to include the sui generis rights in semiconductor topologies and other industrial design rights. A practical definition is that related rights are copyright-type rights that are not covered by the Berne Convention. International protection of related rights. Apart from the Rome convention, a number of other treaties address the protection of related rights: Convention for the Protection of Producers of Phonograms Against Unauthorized Duplication of Their Phonograms (Geneva Phonograms Convention, 1971). Convention Relating to the Distribution of Programme–Carrying Signals Transmitted by Satellite (Brussels Convention, 1974). Treaty on Intellectual Property in Respect of Integrated Circuits (IPIC Treaty, 1989). Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS, 1994). WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty (WPPT, 1996). Apart from the TRIPS Agreement, these treaties cannot truly be described as global: the Rome Convention had 83 signatories as of 2006, compared with 162 for the Berne Convention. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/law-school/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/law-school/support

In copyright law, related rights (or neighboring rights) are the rights of a creative work not connected with the work's actual author. It is used in opposition to the term "authors' rights". Neighboring rights is a more literal translation of the original French droits voisins. Both authors' rights and related rights are copyrights in the sense of English or U.S. law. Related rights vary much more widely in scope between different countries than authors' rights. The rights of performers, phonogram producers and broadcasting organizations are certainly covered, and are internationally protected by the Rome Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organisations signed in 1961. Within the European Union, the rights of film producers (as opposed to directors) and database creators are also protected by related rights, and the term is sometimes extended to include the sui generis rights in semiconductor topologies and other industrial design rights. A practical definition is that related rights are copyright-type rights that are not covered by the Berne Convention. International protection of related rights. Apart from the Rome convention, a number of other treaties address the protection of related rights: Convention for the Protection of Producers of Phonograms Against Unauthorized Duplication of Their Phonograms (Geneva Phonograms Convention, 1971). Convention Relating to the Distribution of Programme–Carrying Signals Transmitted by Satellite (Brussels Convention, 1974). Treaty on Intellectual Property in Respect of Integrated Circuits (IPIC Treaty, 1989). Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS, 1994). WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty (WPPT, 1996). Apart from the TRIPS Agreement, these treaties cannot truly be described as global: the Rome Convention had 83 signatories as of 2006, compared with 162 for the Berne Convention. Relation to authors' rights. Related rights are independent of any authors' rights, as is made clear in the various treaties (Article 1 Rome; Article 7.1 Geneva; Article 1.2 WPPT). Hence a CD recording of a song is concurrently protected by four copyright-type rights: Authors' rights of the composer of the music. Authors' rights of the lyricist. Performers' rights of the singer and musicians. Producers' rights of the person or corporation that made the recording. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/law-school/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/law-school/support

Moral rights are rights of creators of copyrighted works generally recognized in civil law jurisdictions and, to a lesser extent, in some common law jurisdictions. The moral rights include the right of attribution, the right to have a work published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the right to the integrity of the work. The preserving of the integrity of the work allows the author to object to alteration, distortion, or mutilation of the work that is "prejudicial to the author's honor or reputation". Anything else that may detract from the artist's relationship with the work even after it leaves the artist's possession or ownership may bring these moral rights into play. Moral rights are distinct from any economic rights tied to copyrights. Even if an artist has assigned his or her copyright rights to a work to a third party, he or she still maintains the moral rights to the work. Moral rights were first recognized in France and Germany, before they were included in the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works in 1928.  Canada recognizes moral rights (droits moraux) in its Copyright Act (Loi sur le droit d'auteur). The United States became a signatory to the convention in 1989, and incorporated a version of moral rights under its copyright law under Title 17 of the U.S. Code. The Berne convention is not a self-executing treaty, and the US Berne Convention Implementation Act excludes the US from the moral rights section. Some jurisdictions allow for the waiver of moral rights.  In the United States, the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (VARA) recognizes moral rights, but applies only to a narrow subset of works of visual art. "For the purposes of VARA, visual art includes paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and photographs, existing in a single copy or a limited edition of 200 signed and numbered copies or fewer". A photograph must be taken only for exhibition purposes to be recognized under this subcategory. Independent art is not a focus of this waiver, for VARA only works in protecting artwork that can be considered as having "recognized stature"; Some of the items that are voided from VARA's protection include posters, maps, globes, motion pictures, electronic publications, and applied art. The VARA grants artists two specific rights: the right of attribution, and the right of integrity. The right of attribution allows an author to enforce the attribution of their work, prevent the misattribution of their work to another author, and permits the author to retain anonymous or pseudo-anonymous ownership of the work. The right of integrity does its best to prevent distortion or modification of their work, easing an artists' worries surrounding negative defamation directly applied to their work affecting their own personal, creative, or professional reputation through misrepresentation. In the United States, moral rights are not transferable, and end only with the life of the author. Authors may, however, waive their moral rights if this is done in writing. Some jurisdictions like Austria differentiate between narrow and wide moral rights. Whilst the former is about integrity of the work, the latter limits usages, which may harm the author's integrity. Some copyright timestamp services allow an author to publish allowed and disallowed usage intentions to prevent a violation of such wider moral rights. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/law-school/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/law-school/support

Registration. In all countries where the Berne Convention standards apply, copyright is automatic, and need not be obtained through official registration with any government office. Once an idea has been reduced to tangible form, for example by securing it in a fixed medium (such as a drawing, sheet music, photograph, a videotape, or a computer file), the copyright holder is entitled to enforce their exclusive rights. However, while registration is not needed to exercise copyright, in jurisdictions where the laws provide for registration, it serves as prima facie evidence of a valid copyright and enables the copyright holder to seek statutory damages and attorney's fees. (In the US, registering after an infringement only enables one to receive actual damages and lost profits.) A widely circulated strategy to avoid the cost of copyright registration is referred to as the poor man's copyright. It proposes that the creator send the work to themself in a sealed envelope by registered mail, using the postmark to establish the date. This technique has not been recognized in any published opinions of the United States courts. The United States Copyright Office says the technique is not a substitute for actual registration. The United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office discusses the technique and notes that the technique (as well as commercial registries) does not constitute dispositive proof that the work is original or establish who created the work. Fixing. The Berne Convention allows member countries to decide whether creative works must be "fixed" to enjoy copyright. Article 2, Section 2 of the Berne Convention states: "It shall be a matter for legislation in the countries of the Union to prescribe that works in general or any specified categories of works shall not be protected unless they have been fixed in some material form." Some countries do not require that a work be produced in a particular form to obtain copyright protection. For instance, Spain, France, and Australia do not require fixation for copyright protection. The United States and Canada, on the other hand, require that most works must be "fixed in a tangible medium of expression" to obtain copyright protection. US law requires that the fixation be stable and permanent enough to be "perceived, reproduced or communicated for a period of more than transitory duration". Similarly, Canadian courts consider fixation to require that the work be "expressed to some extent at least in some material form, capable of identification and having a more or less permanent endurance". Note this provision of US law: section c) Effect of Berne Convention.—No right or interest in a work eligible for protection under this title may be claimed by virtue of, or in reliance upon, the provisions of the Berne Convention, or the adherence of the United States thereto. Any rights in a work eligible for protection under this title that derive from this title, other Federal or State statutes, or the common law, shall not be expanded or reduced by virtue of, or in reliance upon, the provisions of the Berne Convention, or the adherence of the United States thereto. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/law-school/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/law-school/support

"Author's rights" is a term frequently used in connection with laws about intellectual property. The term is considered as a direct translation of the French term droit d'auteur (also German Urheberrecht). It was first (1777) promoted in France by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, who had close relations with Benjamin Franklin. It is generally used in relation to the copyright laws of civil law countries and in European Union law. Authors' rights are internationally protected by the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and by other similar treaties. “Author” is used in a very wide sense, and includes composers, artists, sculptors and even architects: in general, the author is the person whose creativity led to the protected work being created, although the exact definition varies from country to country. Authors' rights have two distinct components: the economic rights in the work and the moral rights of the author. The economic rights are a property right which is limited in time and which may be transferred by the author to other people in the same way as any other property (although many countries require that the transfer must be in the form of a written contract). They are intended to allow the author or their holder to profit financially from their creation, and include the right to authorize the reproduction of the work in any form (Article 9, Berne Convention). The authors of dramatic works (plays, etc.) also have the right to authorize the public performance of their works (Article 11, Berne Convention). The protection of the moral rights of an author is based on the view that a creative work is in some way an expression of the author's personality: the moral rights are therefore personal to the author, and cannot be transferred to another person except by testament when the author dies. The moral rights regime differs greatly between countries, but typically includes the right to be identified as the author of the work and the right to object to any distortion or mutilation of the work which would be prejudicial to their honor or reputation (Article 6bis, Berne Convention). In many countries, the moral rights of an author are perpetual. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/law-school/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/law-school/support

In the third episode Of Friday Number 5 Owen Kelly mused about the limitations that copyright laws impose on musicians' abilities to use other music as starting points for their own work. He promised to think this through in a more structured way, and this represents his first attempt at doing just that. In this episode Owen looks at the history of copyright from the invention of printing in 1476 to the creation of the Berne Convention in 1886. He asks when Mickey Mouse will step into the public domain, and points to the ways in which the copyrights laws benefit intermediaries much more than creators. He looks at three different ways in which the current laws fail everybody, writers and readers, musicians and listeners. Finally he looks at the recent work of Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin who have developed a computer program that has recorded every possible melody (all 68.7 billion of them) via MIDI to a hard drive, and then made them available in the public domain. He asks what conclusions we might draw from this.

ON THIS EPISODE:PLEASE NOTE:Resource links mentioned in segments & an important footnote regarding Paeter's reference to Ravi Zacharias are included below.Leveraging years of his published content, Paeter tackles another gauntlet of controversial topics that are common for Christian Geeks to face, including:Is Faith Illogical?Is Hell Really What We Think It Is?How Should Geeks Express Criticism Of Entertainment?Is It A Sin To Use Video Game Emulators?Is Collecting A Sin Of Materialism?PLUS, more assorted topics based on your questions, feedback and Paeter's Geek Week!Soul Pancake Jar-Jar Actor Video- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfNiSkd3HfI&t=0sMetro UK Entertainment Article: https://metro.co.uk/2013/02/16/the-legality-of-emulation-part-1-readers-feature-3479741/Berne Convention Info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_ConventionNintendo Legal Page: http://www.nintendo.com/corp/legal.jspUK "Archive Copy" Legislation: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/50ARetrode: https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2012/01/turn_your_retro_cartridges_into_roms_legallyA note from Paeter:Although I would not generally refer people to the work of Ravi Zacharias now (the content about collecting was produced in September 2017) given details of his life that have surfaced recently, the quotation by Frank Boreham still stands on its own as a remark I believe is wise and worth considering. TIMESTAMPS00:00:30 Intro00:05:15 Loki Episode 1 Review00:18:34 Awake Review00:29:52 Infinite Review00:45:08 CGC & Christian Geek News00:56:27 Snow White DID Consent, And Why It Matters (Lorehaven)01:04:31 Pre-E3 Game News Reactions (And Some Spiritual Issues Worth Noticing!)01:29:43 Mentors and our feelings about non-Christians (Philippians Bible Study)01:43:36 Listener/Viewer Messages (Support Of Extra-Life Fundraising Decision)01:46:55 Paeter's Geek Week (Vaccine Recovery, DC Universe Infinite[James Gordon Jr In Suicide Squad #20, Mourning Damian In Batman #20,]) 01:58:57 Next Episode02:01:56 Babylon 5 SchawarmaSupport this podcast and enjoy exclusive rewards at https://www.patreon.com/spiritbladeproductions Episodes #0-500 of this podcast were published as "The Spirit Blade Underground Podcast" and are archived and available for download at www.spiritblade.com , Resources used to prepare the "In Search Of Truth" Bible Study include:"Expositor's Bible Commentary", Frank E. Gaebelein General Editor (Zondervan Publishing House),"The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament", by Dr. John H. Walton, Dr. Victor H. Matthews & Dr. Mark W. Chavalas (InterVarsity Press), "The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament", by Dr. Craig S. Keener (InterVarsity Press),Thayer's Greek Lexicon, Strong's Exhaustive ConcordanceBlueletterbible.org (primarily for search functionality), The Christian Geek Central Statement Of Faith can be found at: http://christiangeekcentral.blogspot.com/p/about.html The Christian Geek Central Podcast is written, recorded and produced by Paeter Frandsen, with additional segments produced by their credited authors. Logo created by Matthew Silber. Copyright 2007-2021, Spirit Blade Productions. Music by Wesley Devine, Bjorn A. Lynne, Pierre Langer, Jon Adamich, audionautix.com and Sound Ideas. Spazzmatica Polka by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Freesound.org effects provided by: FreqMan

The largest global power during the rise of intellectual property was England, so the world adopted her philosophies. The US had the same impact on software law. Most case law that shaped the software industry is based on copyright law. Our first real software laws appeared in the 1970s and now have 50 years of jurisprudence to help guide us. This episode looks at the laws, supreme court cases, and some circuit appeals cases that shaped the software industry. -------- In our previous episode we went through a brief review of how the modern intellectual property laws came to be. Patent laws flowed from inventors in Venice in the 1400s, royals gave privileges to own a monopoly to inventors throughout the rest of Europe over the next couple of centuries, transferred to panels and academies during and after the Age of Revolutions, and slowly matured for each industry as technology progressed.  Copyright laws formed similarly, although they were a little behind patent laws due to the fact that they weren't really necessary until we got the printing press. But when it came to data on a device, we had a case in 1908 we covered in the previous episode that led Congress to enact the 1909 Copyright Act.  Mechanical music boxes evolved into mechanical forms of data storage and computing evolved from mechanical to digital. Following World War II there was an explosion in new technologies, with those in computing funded heavily by US government. Or at least, until we got ourselves tangled up in a very unpopular asymmetrical war in Vietnam. The Mansfield Amendment of 1969, was a small bill in the 1970 Military Authorization Act that ended the US military from funding research that didn't have a direct relationship to a specific military function. Money could still flow from ARPA into a program like the ARPAnet because we wanted to keep those missiles flying in case of nuclear war. But over time the impact was that a lot of those dollars the military had pumped into computing to help develop the underlying basic sciences behind things like radar and digital computing was about to dry up. This is a turning point: it was time to take the computing industry commercial. And that means lawyers. And so we got the first laws pertaining to software shortly after the software industry emerged from more and more custom requirements for these mainframes and then minicomputers and the growing collection of computer programmers. The Copyright Act of 1976 was the first major overhaul to the copyright laws since the 1909 Copyright Act. Since then, the US had become a true world power and much as the rest of the world followed the British laws from the Statute of Anne in 1709 as a template for copyright protections, the world looked on as the US developed their laws. Many nations had joined the Berne Convention for international copyright protections, but the publishing industry had exploded. We had magazines, so many newspapers, so many book publishers. And we had this whole weird new thing to deal with: software.  Congress didn't explicitly protect software in the Copyright Act of 1976. But did add cards and tape as mediums and Congress knew this was an exploding new thing that would work itself out in the courts if they didn't step in. And of course executives from the new software industry were asking their representatives to get in front of things rather than have the unpredictable courts adjudicate a weird copyright mess in places where technology meets copy protection. So in section 117, Congress appointed the National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works, or CONTU) to provide a report about software and added a placeholder in the act that empaneled them. CONTU held hearings. They went beyond just software as there was another newish technology changing the world: photocopying. They presented their findings in 1978 and recommended we define a computer program as a set of statements or instructions to be used directly or indirectly in a computer in order to bring about a certain result. They also recommended that copies be allowed if required to use the program and that those be destroyed when the user no longer has rights to the software. This is important because this is an era where we could write software into memory or start installing compiled code onto a computer and then hand the media used to install it off to someone else.  At the time the hobbyist industry was just about to evolve into the PC industry, but hard disks were years out for most of those machines. It was all about floppies. But up-market there was all kinds of storage and the righting was on the wall about what was about to come. Install software onto a computer, copy and sell the disk, move on. People would of course do that, but not legally.  Companies could still sign away their copyright protections as part of a sales agreement but the right to copy was under the creator's control. But things like End User License Agreements were still far away. Imagine how ludicrous the idea that a piece of software if a piece of software went bad that it could put a company out of business in the 1970s. That would come as we needed to protect liability and not just restrict the right to copy to those who, well, had the right to do so. Further, we hadn't yet standardized on computer languages. And yet companies were building complicated logic to automate business and needed to be able to adapt works for other computers and so congress looked to provide that right at the direction of CONTU as well, if only to the company doing the customizations and not allowing the software to then be resold. These were all hashed out and put into law in 1980. And that's an important moment as suddenly the party who owned a copy was the rightful owner of a piece of software. Many of the provisions read as though we were dealing with book sellers selling a copy of a book, not dealing with the intricate details of the technology, but with technology those can change so quickly and those who make laws aren't exactly technologists, so that's to be expected.  Source code versus compiled code also got tested. In 1982 Williams Electronics v Artic International explored a video game that was in a ROM (which is how games were distributed before disks and cassette tapes. Here, the Third Circuit weighed in on whether if the ROM was built into the machine, if it could be copied as it was utilitarian and therefore not covered under copyright. The source code was protected but what about what amounts to compiled code sitting on the ROM. They of course found that it was indeed protected.  They again weighed in on Apple v Franklin in 1983. Here, Franklin Computer was cloning Apple computers and claimed it couldn't clone the computer without copying what was in the ROMs, which at the time was a remedial version of what we think of as an operating system today.  Franklin claimed the OS was in fact a process or method of operation and Apple claimed it was novel. At the time the OS was converted to a binary language at runtime and that object code was a task called AppleSoft but it was still a program and thus still protected. One and two years later respectively, we got Mac OS 1 and Windows 1. 1986 saw Whelan Associates v Jaslow. Here, Elaine Whelan created a management system for a dental lab on the IBM Series One, in EDL. That was a minicomputer and when the personal computer came along she sued Jaslow because he took a BASIC version to market for the PC. He argued it was a different language and the set of commands was therefore different. But the programs looked structurally similar. She won, as while some literal elements were the same, “the copyrights of computer programs can be infringed even absent copying of the literal elements of the program.” This is where it's simple to identify literal copying of software code when it's done verbatim but difficult to identify non-literal copyright infringement.  But this was all professional software. What about those silly video games all the kids wanted? Well, Atari applied for a copyright for one of their games, Breakout. Here, Register of Copyrights, Ralph Oman chose not to Register the copyright. And so Atari sued, winning in the appeal. There were certainly other dental management packages on the market at the time. But the court found that “copyrights do not protect ideas – only expressions of ideas.” Many found fault with the decision and  the Second Circuit heard Computer Associates v Altai in 1992. Here, the court applied a three-step test of Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison to determine how similar products were and held that Altai's rewritten code did not meet the necessary requirements for copyright infringement. There were other types of litigation surrounding the emerging digital sphere at the time as well. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act came along in 1986 and would be amended in 89, 94, 96, and 2001. Here, a number of criminal offenses were defined - not copyright but they have come up to criminalize activities that should have otherwise been copyright cases. And the Copyright Act of 1976 along with the CONTU findings were amended to cover the rental market came to be (much as happened with VHS tapes and Congress established provisions to cover that in 1990. Keep in mind that time sharing was just ending by then but we could rent video games over dial-up and of course VHS rentals were huge at the time. Here's a fun one, Atari infringed on Nintendo's copyright by claiming they were a defendant in a case and applying to the Copyright Office to get a copy of the 10NES program so they could actually infringe on their copyright. They tried to claim they couldn't infringe because they couldn't make games unless they reverse engineered the systems. Atari lost that one. But Sega won a similar one soon thereafter because playing more games on a Sega was fair use. Sony tried to sue Connectix in a similar case where you booted the PlayStation console using a BIOS provided by Connectix. And again, that was reverse engineering for the sake of fair use of a PlayStation people payed for. Kinda' like jailbreaking an iPhone, right? Yup, apps that help jailbreak, like Cydia, are legal on an iPhone. But Apple moves the cheese so much in terms of what's required to make it work so far that it's a bigger pain to jailbreak than it's worth. Much better than suing everyone.  Laws are created and then refined in the courts. MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer made it to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1993. This involved Eric Francis leaving MAI and joining Peak. He then loaded MAI's diagnostics tools onto computers. MAI thought they should have a license per computer, but yet Peak used the same disk in multiple computers. The crucial change here was that the copy made, while ephemeral, was decided to be a copy of the software and so violated the copyright. We said we'd bring up that EULA though. In 1996, the Seventh Circuit found in ProCD v Zeidenberg, that the license preempted copyright thus allowing companies to use either copyright law or a license when seeking damages and giving lawyers yet another reason to answer any and all questions with “it depends.” One thing was certain, the digital world was coming fast in those Clinton years. I mean, the White House would have a Gopher page and Yahoo! would be on display at his second inauguration. So in 1998 we got the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Here, Congress added to Section 117 to allow for software copies if the software was required for maintenance of a computer. And yet software was still just a set of statements, like instructions in a book, that led the computer to a given result. The DMCA did have provisions to provide treatment to content providers and e-commerce providers. It also implemented two international treaties and provided remedies for anti-circumvention of copy-prevention systems since by then cracking was becoming a bigger thing. There was more packed in here. We got MAI Systems v Peak Computer reversed by law, refinement to how the Copyright Office works, modernizing audio and movie rights, and provisions to facilitate distance education. And of course the DMCA protected boat hull designs because, you know, might as well cram some stuff into a digital copyright act.  In addition to the cases we covered earlier, we had Mazer v Stein, Dymow v Bolton, and even Computer Associates v Altai, which cemented the AFC method as the means most courts determine copyright protection as it extends to non-literal components such as dialogue and images. Time and time again, courts have weighed in on what fair use is because the boundaries are constantly shifting, in part due to technology, but also in part due to shifting business models.  One of those shifting business models was ripping songs and movies. RealDVD got sued by the MPAA for allowing people to rip DVDs. YouTube would later get sued by Viacom but courts found no punitive damages could be awarded. Still, many online portals started to scan for and filter out works they could know were copy protected, especially given the rise of machine learning to aid in the process. But those were big, major companies at the time. IO Group, Inc sued Veoh for uploaded video content and the judge found Veoh was protected by safe harbor.  Safe Harbor mostly refers to the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act, or OCILLA for short, which shields online portals and internet service providers from copyright infringement. This would be separate from Section 230, which protects those same organizations from being sued for 3rd party content uploaded on their sites. That's the law Trump wanted overturned during his final year in office but given that the EU has Directive 2000/31/EC, Australia has the Defamation Act of 2005, Italy has the Electronic Commerce Directive 2000, and lots of other countries like England and Germany have had courts find similarly, it is now part of being an Internet company. Although the future of “big tech” cases (and the damage many claim is being done to democracy) may find it refined or limited. In 2016, Cisco sued Arista for allegedly copying the command line interfaces to manage switches. Cisco lost but had claimed more than $300 million in damages. Here, the existing Cisco command structure allowed Arista to recruit seasoned Cisco administrators to the cause. Cisco had done the mental modeling to evolve those commands for decades and it seemed like those commands would have been their intellectual property. But, Arista hadn't copied the code.  Then in 2017, in ZeniMax vs Oculus, ZeniMax wan a half billion dollar case against Oculus for copying their software architecture.  And we continue to struggle with what copyright means as far as code goes. Just in 2021, the Supreme Court ruled in Google v Oracle America that using application programming interfaces (APIs) including representative source code can be transformative and fall within fair use, though did not rule if such APIs are copyrightable. I'm sure the CP/M team, who once practically owned the operating system market would have something to say about that after Microsoft swooped in with and recreated much of the work they had done. But that's for another episode. And traditional media cases continue. ABS Entertainment vs CBS looked at whether digitally remastering works extended copyright. BMG vs Cox Communications challenged peer-to-peer file-sharing in safe harbor cases (not to mention the whole Napster testifying before congress thing). You certainly can't resell mp3 files the way you could drop off a few dozen CDs at Tower Records, right? Capitol Records vs ReDigi said nope. Perfect 10 v Amazon, Goldman v Breitbart, and so many more cases continued to narrow down who and how audio, images, text, and other works could have the right to copy restricted by creators. But sometimes it's confusing. Dr. Seuss vs ComicMix found that merging Star Trek and “Oh, the Places You'll Go” was enough transformativeness to break the copyright of Dr Seuss, or was that the Fair Use Doctrine? Sometimes I find conflicting lines in opinions. Speaking of conflict… Is the government immune from copyright? Allen v Cooper, Governor of North Carolina made it to the Supreme Court, where they applied blanket copyright protections. Now, this was a shipwreck case but extended to digital works and the Supreme Court seemed to begrudgingly find for the state, and looked to a law as remedy rather than awarding damages. In other words, the “digital Blackbeards” of a state could pirate software at will. Guess I won't be writing any software for the state of North Carolina any time soon! But what about content created by a state? Well, the state of Georgia makes various works available behind a paywall. That paywall might be run by a third party in exchange for a cut of the proceeds. So Public.Resource goes after anything where the edict of a government isn't public domain. In other words, court decision, laws, and statutes should be free to all who wish to access them. The “government edicts doctrine” won in the end and so access to the laws of the nation continue to be free. What about algorithms? That's more patent territory when they are actually copyrightable, which is rare. Gottschalk v. Benson was denied a patent for a new way to convert binary-coded decimals to numerals while Diamond v Diehr saw an algorithm to run a rubber molding machine was patentable. And companies like Intel and Broadcom hold thousands of patents for microcode for chips. What about the emergence of open source software and the laws surrounding social coding? We'll get to the emergence of open source and the consequences in future episodes! One final note, most have never heard of the names in early cases. Most have heard of the organizations listed in later cases. Settling issues in the courts has gotten really, really expensive. And it doesn't always go the way we want. So these days, whether it's Apple v Samsung or other tech giants, the law seems to be reserved for those who can pay for it. Sure, there's the Erin Brockovich cases of the world. And lady justice is still blind. We can still represent ourselves, case and notes are free. But money can win cases by having attorneys with deep knowledge (which doesn't come cheap). And these cases drag on for years and given the startup assembly line often halts with pending legal actions, not many can withstand the latency incurred. This isn't a “big tech is evil” comment as much as “I see it and don't know a better rubric but it's still a thing” kinda' comment. Here's something better that we'd love to have a listener take away from this episode. Technology is always changing. Laws usually lag behind technology change as (like us) they're reactive to innovation. When those changes come, there is opportunity. Not only has the technological advancement gotten substantial enough to warrant lawmaker time, but the changes often create new gaps in markets that new entrants can leverage. Either leaders in markets adapt quickly or see those upstarts swoop in, having no technical debt and being able to pivot faster than those who previously might have enjoyed a first user advantage. What laws are out there being hashed out, just waiting to disrupt some part of the software market today?

Once upon a time, the right to copy text wasn't really necessary. If one had a book, one could copy the contents of the book by hiring scribes to labor away at the process and books were expensive. Then came the printing press. Now, the printer of a work would put a book out and another printer could set their press up to reproduce the same text. More people learned to read and information flowed from the presses at the fastest pace in history.  The printing press spread from Gutenberg's workshop in the 1440s throughout Germany and then to the rest of Europe and appearing in England when William Caxton built the first press there in 1476. It was a time of great change, causing England to retreat into protectionism, and Henry VIII tried to restrict what could be printed in the 1500s. But Parliament needed to legislate further.  England was first to establish copyright when Parliament passed the Licensing of the Press Act in 1662, which regulated what could be printed. This was more to prevent printing scandalous materials and basically gave a monopoly to The Stationers' Company to register, print, copy, and publish books. They could enter another printer and destroy their presses. That went on for a few decades until the act was allowed to lapse in 1694 but began the 350 year journey of refining what copyright and censorship means to a modern society.  The next big step came in England when the Statute of Anne was passed in 1710. It was named for the reigning last Queen of the House of Stuart. While previously a publisher could appeal to have a work censored by others because the publisher had created it, this statute took a page out of the patent laws and granted a right of protection against copying a work for 14 years. Reading through the law and further amendments it is clear that lawmakers were thinking far more deeply about the balance between protecting the license holder of a work and how to get more books to more people. They'd clearly become less protectionist and more concerned about a literate society.  There are examples in history of granting exclusive rights to an invention from the Greeks to the Romans to Papal Bulls. These granted land titles, various rights, or a status to people. Edward the Confessor started the process of establishing the Close Rolls in England in the 1050s, where a central copy of all those granted was kept. But they could also be used to grant a monopoly, with the first that's been found being granted by Edward III to John Kempe of Flanders as a means of helping the cloth industry in England to flourish.  Still, this wasn't exactly an exclusive right but instead a right to emigrate. And the letters were personal and so letters patent evolved to royal grants, which Queen Elizabeth was providing in the late 1500s. That emerged out of the need for patent laws proven by Venicians in the late 1400s, when they started granting exclusive rights by law to inventions for 10 years. King Henry II of France established a royal patent system in France and over time the French Academy of Sciences was put in charge of patent right review. English law evolved and perpetual patents granted by monarchs were stifling progress. Monarchs might grant patents to raise money and so allow a specific industry to turn into a monopoly to raise funds for the royal family. James I was forced to revoke the previous patents, but a system was needed. And so the patent system was more formalized and those for inventions got limited to 14 years when the Statue of Monopolies was passed in England in 1624. The evolution over the next few decades is when we started seeing drawings added to patent requests and sometimes even required. We saw forks in industries and so the addition of medical patents, and an explosion in various types of patents requested.  They weren't just in England. The mid-1600s saw the British Colonies issuing their own patents. Patent law was evolving outside of England as well. The French system was becoming larger with more discoveries. By 1729 there were digests of patents being printed in Paris and we still keep open listings of them so they're easily proven in court. Given the maturation of the Age of Enlightenment, that clashed with the financial protectionism of patent laws and intellectual property as a concept emerged but borrowed from the patent institutions bringing us right back to the Statute of Anne, which established the modern Copyright system. That and the Statue of Monopolies is where the British Empire established the modern copyright and patent systems respectively, which we use globally today. Apparently they were worth keeping throughout the Age of Revolution, mostly probably because they'd long been removed from the monarchal control and handed to various public institutions. The American Revolution came and went. The French Revolution came and went. The Latin American wars of independence, revolutions throughout the 1820s , the end of Feudalism, Napoleon. But the wars settled down and a world order of sorts came during the late 1800s. One aspect of that world order was the Berne Convention, which was signed in 1886. This  established the bilateral recognition of copyrights among sovereign nations that signed onto the treaty, rather than have various nations enter into pacts between one another. Now, the right to copy works were automatically in force at creation, so authors no longer had to register their mark in Berne Convention countries. Following the Age of Revolutions, there was also an explosion of inventions around the world. Some ended up putting copyrighted materials onto reproducible forms. Early data storage. Previously we could copyright sheet music but the introduction of the player piano led to the need to determine the copyright ability of piano rolls in White-Smith Music v. Apollo in 1908. Here we saw the US Supreme Court find that these were not copies as interpreted in the US Copyright Act because only a machine could read them and they basically told congress to change the law. So Congress did. The Copyright Act of 1909 then specified that even if only a machine can use information that's protected by copyright, the copyright protection remains. And so things sat for a hot minute as we learned first mechanical computing, which is patentable under the old rules and then electronic computing which was also patentable. Jacquard patented his punch cards in 1801. But by the time Babbage and Lovelace used them in his engines that patent had expired. And the first digital computer to get a patent was the Eckert-Mauchly ENIAC, which was filed in 1947, granted in 1964, and because there was a prior unpatented work, overturned in 1973. Dynamic RAM was patented in 1968. But these were for physical inventions. Software took a little longer to become a legitimate legal quandary. The time it took to reproduce punch cards and the lack of really mass produced software didn't become an issue until after the advent of transistorized computers with Whirlwind, the DEC PDP, and the IBM S/360. Inventions didn't need a lot of protections when they were complicated and it took years to build one. I doubt the inventor of the Antikythera Device in Ancient Greece thought to protect their intellectual property because they'd of likely been delighted if anyone else in the world would have thought to or been capable of creating what they created. Over time, the capabilities of others rises and our intellectual property becomes more valuable because progress moves faster with each generation. Those Venetians saw how technology and automation was changing the world and allowed the protection of inventions to provide a financial incentive to invent. Licensing the commercialization of inventions then allows us to begin the slow process of putting ideas on a commercialization assembly line.  Books didn't need copyright until they could be mass produced and were commercially viable. That came with mass production. A writer writes, or creates intellectual property and a publisher prints and distributes. Thus we put the commercialization of literature and thoughts and ideas on an assembly line. And we began doing so far before the Industrial Revolution.  Once there were more inventions and some became capable of mass producing the registered intellectual property of others, we saw a clash in copyrights and patents. And so we got the Copyright Act of 1909. But with digital computers we suddenly had software emerging as an entire industry. IBM had customized software for customers for decades but computer languages like FORTRAN and mass storage devices that could be moved between computers allowed software to be moved between computers and sometimes entire segments of business logic moved between companies based on that software. By the 1960s, companies were marketing computer programs as a cottage industry.  The first computer program was deposited at the US Copyright Office in 1961. It was a simple thing. A tape with a computer program that had been filed by North American Aviation. Imagine the examiners looking at it with their heads cocked to the side a bit. “What do we do with this?” They hadn't even figured it out when they got three more from General Dynamics and two more programs showed up from a student at Columbia Law.  A punched tape held a bunch of punched cards. A magnetic tape just held more punched tape that went faster. This was pretty much what those piano rolls from the 1909 law had on them. Registration was added for all five in 1964. And thus software copyright was born. But of course it wasn't just a metallic roll that had impressions for when a player piano struck a hammer. If someone found a roll on the ground, they could put it into another piano and hit play. But the likelihood that they could put reproduce the piano roll was low. The ability to reproduce punch cards had been there. But while it likely didn't take the same amount of time it took to reproduce a copy Plato's Republic before the advent of the printing press, the occurrences weren't frequent enough to encounter a likely need for adjudication. That changed with high speed punch devices and then the ability to copy magnetic tape. Contracts (which we might think of as EULAs today in a way) provided a license for a company to use software, but new questions were starting to form around who was bound to the contract and how protection was extended based on a number of factors. Thus the LA, or License Agreement part of EULA rather than just a contract when buying a piece of software.  And this brings us to the forming of the modern software legal system. That's almost a longer story than the written history we have of early intellectual property law, so we'll pick that up in the next episode of the podcast!

Copyright in a Nutshell for Artists & FilmmakersBrian L. FryeIntroductionHello! Welcome to this introduction to copyright for artists and filmmakers. I’m Brian L. Frye. I’m a professor of law at the University of Kentucky College of Law, where I teach copyright law, among other things. But I’m also an artist and a filmmaker. I earned an MFA in film from the San Francisco Art Institute, was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, and co-produced the documentary film Our Nixon, which premiered at SXSW and was broadcast on CNN. So, I understand copyright not only from the perspective of a lawyer, but also from the perspective of an artist and a filmmaker.The purpose of this lecture is to help you understand copyright law and how it affects artists and filmmakers. Hopefully, they will provide practical information that will be useful for practicing artists and filmmakers. Obviously, I can’t even begin to explain all of copyright law in an hour. But I will address the most important concepts and help you understand how they apply to art and movies.I’ll begin by asking why copyright exists in the first place. There are lots of ways to answer that question. For example, some people think the purpose of copyright is to help authors profit from their works. Other people think it’s to help authors control the use of their works. And still others think it’s to benefit the public, by encouraging authors to create works in the first place. Maybe all of those reasons are true. Often, they all point to the same answer. But sometimes they conflict with each other. And when they do, we have to ask which reason is the most important and why.Next, I’ll ask what copyright protects. The answer is, almost everything! Copyright protects the original elements of a work of authorship. But it is very forgiving. Essentially, an element of a work is original so long as it isn’t copied from another work.I’ll ask how you get a copyright, and what you should do once you have one. The answer is, it’s easy! As soon as you create a work, you own a copyright in all of its original elements. No need to do anything else. But you can and should register the work with the Copyright Office, if you think it might have commercial value, because you usually can’t enforce your copyright without registering it.I’ll ask how long a copyright lasts. The answer is, almost forever! Currently, the copyright term is usually the life of the longest-lived author of a work, plus an additional 70 years. The exception is that copyright in works created for an employer lasts 95 years from creation or 120 years from publication, whichever expires first. When the copyright term ends, a work falls into the public domain, which means that anyone can use it in any way they like, without asking permission.I’ll ask what copyright does. The answer is, it gives authors certain exclusive rights to use the works they create. Specifically, copyright gives authors the exclusive right to copy, sell, and show their works, as well as the exclusive right to create new works based on their works. Of course, authors can sell those rights to others. And there are also certain limits on their exclusive rights, including fair use.I’ll ask what counts as copyright infringement. The answer is, any use of a work that violates one of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner may be infringing, unless the owner gave permission. In other words, copying a work, selling copies of a work, and presenting a work to the public all may be copyright infringement. Likewise, using elements of a work to create a new work may also be copyright infringement, if the new work is sufficiently similar to the original.I’ll ask what happens to copyright infringers. The answer is, nothing good! The copyright owner can not only force them to stop infringing, but also force them to pay damages. Copyright owners who prove infringement are always entitled to actual damages, but many copyright owners are also entitled to statutory damages, which may be substantial, even if the cost of the infringement was trivial.And I’ll ask what fair use is and why it matters. The answer is that it’s the most important exception to copyright infringement, because it ensures that copyright permits free speech. Among other things, the First Amendment prevents the government from limiting speech, without a really good reason. Copyright necessarily limits speech, by preventing people from using works in certain ways without permission. Fair use says that copyright owners can’t stop people from criticizing or discussing their works.Obviously, there’s a lot more to copyright than these eight questions. But I think they will help you better understand what copyright is for, what it protects, what it prohibits, and what it permits. And maybe most importantly, I hope they encourage you to ask what copyright actually does, whether it is effective, and how we could improve it.What is Copyright?You may have heard people talk about “intellectual property,” a blanket term for ownership of expressions and ideas. Copyright is a kind of intellectual property that protects original works of authorship. Other kinds of intellectual property include patent, which protects novel inventions and discoveries, trademark, which protects distinctive marks used in commerce, and trade secret, which protects confidential commercial information. While we refer to all of these things as intellectual property, they don’t really have anything to do with each other, other than that they all protect “knowledge goods,” or valuable concepts.People often confuse the different kinds of intellectual property. That’s a problem, because they protect different things in different ways. For example, in order to get a patent, you have to describe your invention to the Patent Office and explain why it is new. If you get a patent, it can only protect the new thing you invented, and other people can use your invention to create other new things. In order to get a trademark, you have to use a symbol in a way that communicates information to consumers. For example, you could use the word “apple” to tell consumers who made a computer. Or you could use the word “amazon” to tell consumers who is selling a book. For what it’s worth, a commercial publisher uses the phrase “in a nutshell” to identify its legal study aids, but they did not publish this lecture or essay, and I have nothing to do with them. Are you confused?Anyway, copyright gives authors ownership of the works they create. Or rather, copyright says that no one can copy, sell, or show a protected work, without the 7author’s permission. Copyright has existed for a long time, more or less since the printing press made it possible to publish books. Copyright forced publishers to compete by selling different books, rather than by selling the same books for lower prices.The Constitution gave Congress the power to create copyright in the United States, and it did. In the United States, copyright is created almost entirely by federal law. While most other countries have also created copyright, different countries protect copyright in different ways. However, most countries have joined the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, which provides some common ground.People disagree about the purpose of copyright. In the United States, most people think the purpose of copyright is to encourage authors to create new works. If copyright didn’t exist, people wouldn’t have to pay for works of authorship, and it would be hard for authors to make a profit. Copyright means authors can force people to pay, which encourages them to create more works. This is an economic theory of copyright, because it says that the purpose of copyright is to benefit the public, by encouraging authors to produce works the public wants.But many people think the purpose of copyright is really to protect authors. Some people think that authors have a natural right to own and control the works they create. After all, a work doesn’t exist until an author creates it. Surely people ought to be able to control the things they create? Other people think authors ought to be able to control the use of the works they create, because they express the autonomy and personality of the author. Why shouldn’t people be able to control the use of their ideas and expressions? These are moral theories of copyright, because they say the purpose of copyright is to protect the rights of authors.Theories of copyright matter, because they shape what copyright protects and prohibits. We decide what copyright should do by asking what copyright is for. Often, economic and moral theories of copyright reach the same results. But sometimes they don’t. For example, the economic theory of copyright says people can use a work, so long as they pay for it. But the moral theories say authors can stop people from using their works, even if they are willing to pay. So, is copyright about compensation or control? As always, it depends. But how we answer that question shapes both copyright and the freedom of speech.What Does Copyright Protect?Copyright protects original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium. That’s a mouthful, but it doesn’t mean much. As a practical matter, copyright protects just about everything you create. Obviously, copyright protects books, songs, paintings, and movies. But that’s not all. Copyright protects a lot more besides. Every email, tweet, instagram, tiktok, snapchat, and text is also protected by copyright, so long as it’s arguably unique, even in the most trivial way.But I’ll be more specific. The Supreme Court held that a work of authorship is original and can be protected by copyright only if it was independently created by the author of the work and reflects some minimal degree of creativity. Independently created just means not copied. Even the most banal work is independently created, so long as it isn’t a copy of another work. After all, most emails aren’t copied, and every snapshot is by definition unique. Of course, copyright also requires creativity. While it’s unclear what creativity requires, it clearly doesn’t require much. The Supreme Court held that copyright couldn’t protect a white pages telephone directory, because it totally lacked creativity. But it implied that copyright could protect anything else.Some works of conceptual art might not be protected by copyright, if they are sufficiently abstract. But the overwhelming majority of works are obviously protected. As a rule of thumb, if your work consists of more than an abstract idea, it’s almost certainly protected by copyright.What’s more, copyright protects every original part of a work. So, if you create a work, you own the work as a whole, but you also own all of the original elements of the work. Obviously, copyright protects the sentences in a literary work and the images in a pictorial work, but it may also protect a particular way of expressing an idea in literary or pictorial form.But copyright can’t protect abstract ideas, only particular expressions of those ideas. In other words, as the elements of a work get more abstract, they get less copyright protection, until they get none at all. Or rather, copyright can protect a particular way of expressing an idea, but can’t protect the idea itself.An important thing to remember is that copyright only protects intangible works of authorship, not particular copies of those works. So, copyright protects the text of a novel, not particular books. But copyright also protects the intangible work of authorship expressed in a painting or sculpture, not the physical object itself.How Do You Get a Copyright?I bet you’ve heard people talk about copyrighting their work of authorship or telling you to copyright something you’ve created. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Copyright isn’t a verb. You can’t copyright anything, because copyright automatically protects works of authorship, as soon as they are created and recorded.The Copyright Act provides that copyright protects original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium. In other works, as soon as you create something and create a record of what you created, it’s protected by copyright, automatically. You wrote down a poem? It’s protected by copyright. You recorded a song? It’s protected by copyright. You made a video? It’s protected by copyright.Of course, you can also register your work with the Copyright Office. Registration doesn’t create copyright ownership. But it does give copyright owners certain valuable rights, including the right to sue for copyright infringement, and the right to demand statutory damages, as opposed to actual damages, which may often bee nominal.Copyright registration is easy and relatively inexpensive, and you can do it online. If you’ve created a work you think might have commercial value, it might make sense for you to register it. You might even be able to register several works at the same time. But you don’t need to register your works in order to own a copyright in them. And it probably doesn’t make sense to register them, unless you want to be able to stop people from using them without your permission.Anyway, whether or not a work is registered, the author can only own the original elements. Sometimes, they are quite valuable, but more often than not, they aren’t. More often than not, copyright is a way for people to accept that the dream is over, because no one is offering a better deal.Who Owns a Copyright?In theory, copyright ownership is simple. If you create a work of authorship, you own the copyright in the work you created. But in practice, it can get complicated. After all, some works are created by many different people, and many works are created for an employer.When people create a work together, everyone who participates is an author and a copyright owner, so long as they contribute an original element that copyright can protect and everyone agrees they are a co-author. So, if you have the idea for a work, but don’t actually participate in creating it, you aren’t an author or copyright owner, because copyright can’t protect ideas. And if you edit a work created by someone else, you aren’t an author or a copyright owner, unless the original author agrees.Co-authors own the copyright in a work jointly. In other words, all of the authors own the entire work collectively, and all of the authors can use the work in any way they like, so long as they don’t harm the value of the work, and share any profits with the other owners. Of course, the owners of a work can make more complicated agreements about how to use the work and share profits, as well.If a work is created by an employee for an employer, then it is a “work made for hire,” and the employer is the author for the purpose of copyright ownership. For some works, like movies, everyone can agree that the work is a work made for hire in a signed contract. But many works, like books and paintings, can be works made for hire only if the person who creates them is actually an employee, which usually means they have to be on payroll.Copyright is a property right, so it can be transferred, like any other property right. While the author of a work is the initial copyright owner, the author can transfer copyright ownership to someone else. Authors can even transfer copyright ownership before they even create a work. In addition, copyright owners can transfer as much or as little of their copyright as they want. If you own the copyright in a movie, you can sell it to someone else, or you can sell part of the copyright, like the right to show the movie in a particular place, in a particular way, for a particular period of time.When authors sell their copyright in a work, they may eventually be able to get it back. The Copyright Act allows authors to terminate the transfer of copyright after 25 years, by following certain procedures. However, the person who created a work can terminate its transfer only if they were the initial author and copyright owner. In other words, an employee can’t reclaim the copyright in a work made for hire, because they were never the author in the first place.How Long Does a Copyright Last?The length of copyright protection has gradually increased over time. Initially, copyright lasted 14 years, but could be renewed for another 14 years. Every once in a while, Congress made the copyright last longer, until it lasted 56 years. Then, in 1976, Congress revised the Copyright Act to make copyright last until all of the authors of a work died, plus an additional 50 years. And in 1998, Congress made copyright last an additional 20 years.Today, copyright usually lasts for the life of the author or authors of a work, plus an additional 70 years. However, because the author of a work made for hire is usually a company, copyright in those works lasts for 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever ends first.When the copyright in a work ends, it enters the public domain, which means no one owns it anymore, and anyone can use it in any way they like. Every year, on January 1, works published 95 years earlier enter the public domain. So, in 2020, works published in 1925 entered the public domain.In theory, copyright is supposed to ensure that works are available to the public, by giving copyright owners an economic incentive to publish them. But in reality, most of the works protected by copyright aren’t worth anything when they are created, and even those that are worth something quickly lose their value. As a result, many works are unavailable, because the copyright owner can’t be bothered to publish them. But copyright means that no one else can publish them either. Scholars have observed that public domain works are far more widely available than works protected by copyright, precisely because people can make them available without worrying about infringement.Many people think copyright lasts too long and protects too many things. They think more works should be in the public domain and people should be able to use copyrighted works more freely. Unfortunately, the law isn’t on their side. Congress assumes people want to own whatever they create, and tends to make copyright stronger and longer, rather than shorter and weaker. In fact, the Copyright Act doesn’t even provide a way for people to put works they own in the public domain.Accordingly, people who want less copyright protection created Creative Commons licenses, which enable copyright owners to give people permission to do things copyright prohibits. After all, if copyright owners can sell their rights, they can also give them away. The most popular Creative Commons license is the CC-BY license, which permits people to use a work in any way they like, so long as they credit it to the author. But there is also a CC0 version, which declares a work to be in the public domain.What Does Copyright Do?Copyright gives copyright owners the exclusive right to use the work they own in certain ways. That’s why we call it a property right. It creates the right to exclude people from using a work without permission. Broadly speaking, copyright gives copyright owners four exclusive rights: reproduction, distribution, presentation, and adaptation.The reproduction right is the essence of copyright. It says that copyright owners have the exclusive right to create copies of the works they own. In order to use a work, you need a copy of it. The reproduction right enables copyright owners to control access to a work by controlling the creation of copies. Of course, it is often observed in the breach. People often create copies of works, without even realizing they are infringers. After all, if you’ve ever created a mixtape for your friend, or written down the lyrics of your favorite song, you’ve infringed the reproduction right.The distribution right reflects the reality of copyright ownership. The primary purpose of copyright is to enable copyright owners to profit from the works they own. Accordingly, copyright owners care about commercial uses of their works, but don’t care about private uses. The distribution right gives copyright owners the exclusive right to distribute copies of their works to the public. Or to put it more bluntly, only copyright owners can sell copies of their works.The most important limitation on the distribution right is the first sale doctrine, which says that copyright owners can only control the distribution of a particular copy of their work the first time it is sold. The first sale doctrine is why we have used bookstores and record stores. Only the copyright owner can create and sell copies of a book or record. But once they sell a copy, it’s just a thing, and the owner can sell it like any other thing.The transition from physical to digital media is a problem for copyright, because it’s unclear how to distinguish between a work and copies of a work. It used to be that copyright protected a story or a song, but not a particular book or record. But what is the difference between a story and text file, or a song and an audio file? What does it mean to own a digital file, if anything?The internet is also a problem for copyright because it makes reproducing and distributing works essentially free. Back in the day, it was expensive to make copies of a work and make them available. Now, it’s effortless and free. Suddenly, copyright ownership is pure profit, with little or no risk, once a work proves popular. But how much should copyright owners be able to charge, as their costs evaporate? Copyright was designed for a world in which reproduction and distribution were costly. Does it make any sense in a world where they are free?The presentation right gives copyright owners the exclusive right to publicly display or perform the works they own. It used to be that public display and performance was how copyright owners made money. For example, when people went to movie theaters, the public performance right enabled movie producers to profit from every screening. Today, the public display and performance rights are important primarily because they supplement the distribution right.The adaptation right gives copyright owners the exclusive right to create derivative works, or new works based on a work they own. Typically, that means translating a work into a different language, transforming it into a different medium, or creating a sequel. But the adaptation right is much broader. It gives copyright owners the exclusive right to use any original element of the work they own, which means every sentence of a book, riff in a song, or sequence in a movie might be protected by copyright.Almost everything we create is a derivative work, even though we don’t realize it. The Copyright Acts says that a derivative work is a work that incorporates an original element of a previously existing work. Well, most works owe at least something to an existing work. And quoting or paraphrasing an existing work is a great way to make your work a derivative work, at least from a copyright perspective. We tell ourselves that works are original, but in reality almost all of them are based on something else. And we like it that way. People tend to like familiar things, and dislike weird ones. Most people don’t like creativity all that much. A little bit is fine, but don’t overdo it.Anyway, while most people think copyright protects works as a whole, it actually protects every element of a work, no matter how small, as long it qualifies for copyright protection. Of course, copyright protects almost everything, so almost every element of a work is protected by copyright, whether or not the author even realizes it. For better or worse, any element of a work that makes people think about the work is probably protected by copyright, and lots more besides!Copyright also gives artists special protections. In 1990, Congress passed the Visual Artists Rights Act, which gave artists the rights of attribution and integrity, in order to bring United States copyright law in line with the Berne Convention. The attribution right enables artists to prevent plagiarism and the right of integrity enables artists to prevent the destruction of their works. But VARA doesn’t really do all that much. It only applies to unique works, only protects important works, and can be waived by the artist. When a work is valuable, the owner usually wants to attribute and protect it. The only time VARA really matters is when the owner of a work wants to get rid of it. Many recent VARA disputes involve graffiti. When a property owner wants to demolish a decorated building, in order to create a new one, who’s in the right? It all depends on how you think about copyright ownership.What Is Copyright Infringement?Copyright is a property right. The primary purpose of copyright is to prevent people from using a work without permission. And any commercial use of a work might be infringing. But of course, it depends. In order to prove copyright infringement, a copyright owner has to show the defendant actually copied a protected element of the work, and that the works are similar, because of the copied element.Actual copying matters, because most works are similar to each other. Or rather, copyright only protects the original elements of a work, but most works aren’t all that original, and people have a disconcerting tendency to arrive at the same ideas at the same time. Sometimes, works are similar because of copying. But often, it’s just a coincidence. It’s not unusual for people to have similar ideas at the same time.But copyright infringement also requires substantial similarity. In other words, a new work infringes a previously existing work only if it actually copies elements of the previously existing work, and is substantially similar to that work, because of what it copied.Different courts have different ideas about how to identify substantial similarity. Some courts identify the protected elements that the allegedly infringing work copied, and ask whether copying those elements constitutes infringement. Other courts just compare the two works, and ask whether they are similar. Obviously, how you ask the question affects the outcome. On one level, more copyright protection is good for artists and filmmakers, because it enables them to exercise more control over their works, and claim more profits. But on another level, its bad, because copyright makes it harder for artists and filmmakers to use existing works in order to create new works.More often than not, artists and filmmakers want to have it both ways. They want to be able to use existing works when it’s convenient. But they also want to control the use of the works they create. How should we square the circle? Should we let authors control how people use their works, or should we let people use works however they like?You’ve probably heard about plagiarism. It’s similar to copyright infringement, but different. Copyright gives authors certain rights to control how their works are used, in order to enable them to make a profit from selling their works. Plagiarism norms allow people to copy and use works without permission. They only require attribution. But if you copy a work without attribution, the plagiarism police will make you sorry.Notably, plagiarism norms protect works and elements of works that copyright can’t protect. Copyright can’t protect ideas, but plagiarism norms do. Copyright says you can copy ideas willy-nilly. But the plagiarism police will punish you if you copy ideas without attributing them to their “owner.” Similarly, copyright says you can use public domain works in any way you like, but the plagiarism police disagree. For example, copyright says that I can publish The Importance of Being Earnest by Brian L. Frye. After all, it’s a public domain work, and I can use it in any way I like. But plagiarism norms say I can’t, and the plagiarism police would punish me if I tried.What Happens to Copyright Infringers?Copyright enables copyright owners to profit from their works. But it also lets them force other people to shut up. When a copyright owner notices that someone is using their work without permission, they can tell them to stop. If the work is registered with the Copyright Office, they can also file an infringement action. Even if you prove infringement, it can be hard to prove damages. But the Copyright Act enables copyright owners who register their works to claim statutory damages, which can be substantial, even if there is no evidence of actual harm. In fact, statutory damages can be as much as $150,000 per infringement, although courts usually award less. Still, the risk of damages can encourage defendants to settle, even if the infringement claim is weak.Copyright owners can also seek an injunction, to prevent an infringer from using their work. The problem is that injunctions can infringe free speech. After all, copyright owners are usually happy for people to use their works. If they want people to stop, it’s usually because they want to control what people have to say. But sometimes, people use copyright because they don’t have any other choice. For example, some people have used copyright to suppress images and videos of themselves. It’s understandable that people would use any tool available to protect themselves. But should they have to rely on copyright? After all, it applies to some offensive works, but not others. Or should we find another way to suppress offensive works?But the internet has its own rules. Many people think the internet is a copyright-free zone. Wrong! But it can be hard to enforce copyright on the internet, not only because so many internet users are anonymous, but also because the internet is just too vast to monitor.Anyway, most copyright owners want to stop popular platforms like YouTube and the Internet Archive from providing infringing content. Not to mention illicit pirate sites. In 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. Among other things, section 512 of the DMCA gave websites a safe harbor to protect them from copyright infringement liability for third-party content. Under the DMCA, if a copyright owner tells a website that someone has uploaded an infringing file, the website is immune from liability if it takes down the content. If the person who uploaded the content objects to the takedown, the copyright owner has to file an infringement action. If they don’t the website can restore the file.What is Fair Use?Copyright prevents people from using works without permission. But copyright has many exceptions. The most important exception is fair use, which provides that people can use works without permission, if they have a good reason. Essentially, copyright says that copyright owners have an exclusive right to use the works they own in order to make money. But fair use says that everyone else has a right to use those works in order to talk about them, so long as they aren’t competing with the copyright owner.In other words, copyright says that the copyright owner of a book has the exclusive right to reproduce and sell copies of the book. But the fair use doctrine says that other people have the right to copy parts of the book in order to criticize it, or comment on its reception. Fair use ensures that copyright owners can’t abuse copyright, by preventing them from asserting copyright claims against infringers who are engaging in protected speech.The fair use doctrine has existed for a long time. In fact, a version of the fair use doctrine is probably as old as copyright itself. After all, when publishers invented copyright in the 17th century, it reflected industry norms and expectations, same as always. When copyright became a property right, rather than a cartel norm, courts recognized certain exceptions, which came to be known as fair use. And when the United States created copyright law, courts read fair use into the statute.Eventually, Congress codified the fair use doctrine in the Copyright Act of 1976. At least in theory, the codification wasn’t supposed to change the law. Among other things, it identified four factors that courts should consider when determining whether an unlicensed use of a copyrighted work is a protected fair use:Whether the use transforms the original work;Whether the original work is factual or fictional;How much of the original work is used; andWhether the new work is a substitute for the original work.Typically, the first factor is the most important. Courts tend to ask whether the use of a work is transformative. If they answer yes, it’s almost always a fair use. The problem is that no one knows what “transformative” means. Sometimes, a use is transformative if consumers can tell the difference between the original work and the new work. But sometimes it isn’t. After all, a court held that Blurred Lines infringed Got to Give It Up, even though no one could possibly confuse the two songs. Sure, they are similar, but they aren’t the same. Transformativeness says changing a work avoids copyright infringement, but it doesn’t tell us how much change is necessary.At the end of the day, courts don’t actually rely on the fair use factors, any more than they rely on any other doctrinal test. In reality, they ask themselves whether a use is infringing, and use the test to explain their decision. So, a use is transformative if the judge thinks it should be protected, and not transformative if the judge thinks it should be infringing.The Supreme Court has explicitly recognized that copyright owners can’t prevent people from making fun of their works. But it hasn’t done a great job of explaining the scope of the fair use doctrine. Many people think fair use protects parody, and little more. They’re wrong. Fair use can protect any critical use of a work that isn’t a substitute for the work it criticizes.Many people are critical of fair use. Some of them think it goes too far. After all, why should people be able to use a copyrighted work without permission, or even paying a licensing fee? But others think it doesn’t go far enough. The copyleft advocate Lawrence Lessig famously referred to fair use as “the right to hire a lawyer,” because it can be hard to know whether you are protected, and expensive to defend yourself, if a copyright owner disagrees.But copyright maximalists and copyright skeptics both go too far. Yes, there’s a lot of copyright infringement, and it can be hard for copyright owners to stop it. But works are made to be used. And users have rights too, whether or not authors like it. For example, fans can and should be able to use the works they love to create new works, especially when they do it for free. Sure, some authors don’t like it. But when you create a popular work, public commentary comes with the territory.As for copyright skeptics, they’re right that fair use can be dangerous ground. But at the same time, we do fair use all the time, without even thinking about it. After all, quoting an article is technically infringing, but fair use. And yet, we don’t think of it that way. Rather, we just think of it as non-infringing. The purpose of fair use is to force us to have a conversation about the kinds of uses we want copyright owners to be able to control, and the kinds of uses we want to protect.And things have begun to change, especially for filmmakers. Thanks to the efforts of copyright lawyers like Michael Donaldson, filmmakers who claim fair use can insure themselves against the risk of copyright litigation. If you can insure yourself against a risk, you can safely ignore it. As a consequence, filmmakers take full advantage of the fair use doctrine.Artists have always ignored copyright, using whatever they like to create their works. As Picasso famously observed, good artists copy, but great artists steal. Actually, he probably lifted the quip from someone else. The point is that artists usually don’t care about copyright, because they typically create and sell unique objects, not copies. But some artists have been hit with copyright infringement actions anyway. Andy Warhol copied the image he used for his popular Flowers paintings, and ultimately paid a licensing fee. More recently, Jeff Koons and Richard Prince have been sued for copyright infringement, with mixed results. Maybe artists need a way to insure themselves against copyright infringement actions, too?At the end of the day, the purpose of the fair use doctrine is to ensure that people can use copyrighted works in productive ways. Does it always accomplish that goal? No. But at the very least, fair use encourages people to think about what copyright is supposed to do, and what it is supposed to accomplish. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

A copyright troll is a party (person or company) that enforces copyrights it owns for purposes of making money through litigation, in a manner considered unduly aggressive or opportunistic, generally without producing or licensing the works it owns for paid distribution. Critics object to the activity because they believe it does not encourage the production of creative works, but instead makes money through the inequities and unintended consequences of high statutory damages provisions in copyright laws intended to encourage creation of such works. Both the term and the concept of a copyright troll began to appear in the mid-2000s. It derives from the pejorative "patent trolls", which are companies that enforce patent rights to earn money from companies that are selling products, without having products of their own for sale. It is distinguished from organizations such as ASCAP, which collect royalties and enforce copyrights of their members. Limitations and exceptions to copyright are provisions, in local copyright law or Berne Convention, which allow for copyrighted works to be used without a license from the copyright owner. Limitations and exceptions to copyright relate to a number of important considerations such as market failure, freedom of speech, education and equality of access (such as by the visually impaired). Some view limitations and exceptions as "user rights"—seeing user rights as providing an essential balance to the rights of the copyright owners. There is no consensus among copyright experts as to whether user rights are rights or simply limitations on copyright. See for example the National Research Council's Digital Agenda Report, note 1. The concept of user rights has also been recognized by courts, including the Canadian Supreme Court in CCH Canadian Ltd v. Law Society of Upper Canada (2004), which classed "fair dealing" as such a user right. These kinds of disagreements in philosophy are quite common in the philosophy of copyright, where debates about jurisprudential reasoning tend to act as proxies for more substantial disagreements about good policy. The idea–expression distinction or idea–expression dichotomy is a legal doctrine in the United States that limits the scope of copyright protection by differentiating an idea from the expression or manifestation of that idea. Unlike patents, which may confer proprietary rights in relation to general ideas and concepts per se when construed as methods, copyrights cannot confer such rights. An adventure novel provides an illustration of the concept. Copyright may subsist in the work as a whole, in the particular story or characters involved, or in any artwork contained in the book, but generally not in the idea or genre of the story. Copyright, therefore, may not subsist in the idea of a man venturing out on a quest, but may subsist in a particular story that follows that pattern. Similarly, if the methods or processes described in a work are patentable, they may be the subject of various patent claims, which may or may not be broad enough to cover other methods or processes based on the same idea. Arthur C. Clarke, for example, sufficiently described the concept of a communications satellite (a geostationary satellite used as a telecommunications relay) in a 1945 paper that it was not considered patentable in 1954 when it was developed at Bell Labs. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/law-school/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/law-school/support

Moral rights. Moral rights are rights of creators of copyrighted works that are generally recognized in civil law jurisdictions and, to a lesser extent, in some common law jurisdictions. They include the right of attribution and the right to the integrity of the work, which bars the work from alteration, distortion, or mutilation without the author's permission. Paraphrasing without permission may be seen as violating moral rights. Moral rights are distinct from any economic rights tied to copyrights. Even if the author has assigned their copyright to a third party, they still maintain the moral rights to the work. Moral rights were first recognized in France and Germany. They were included in the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works in 1928. While the United States became a signatory to the Berne convention in 1989, it does not completely recognize moral rights as part of copyright law, which is seen as protecting commercial rights in intellectual property, but as part of other bodies of law such as defamation or unfair competition which protect the reputation of the author. Edward Gibbon published the last three volumes of his masterpiece The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1788, at a time when both copyright and moral rights were poorly enforced. With a small private income, he was not dependent on sales but was more concerned about the damage to his reputation from poor translations, a form of paraphrasing. He wrote, "The French, Italian and German translations have been executed with various success; but instead of patronizing, I should willingly suppress such imperfect copies which injure the character while they propagate the name of the author. The Irish pirates are at once my friends and my enemies...." By the start of the twentieth century, U.S. decisions on unfair competition found that representing as the author's work a version of the work that substantially departed from the original was a cause of action. Section §43(a) of the Lanham Act, which protects brands and trademarks, also provides similar protection to laws based on moral rights. For any goods or services, it bans false designation of origin or a false description or representation. In Gilliam v American Broadcasting the British comedy group called Monty Python took action against the ABC network for broadcasting versions of their programs which had been correctly attributed to them but had been extensively edited, in part to remove content that their audience might consider offensive or obscene. The judgement of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit was in favor of Monty Python, finding the cuts might be an "actionable mutilation" that violated the Lanham Act. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/law-school/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/law-school/support

International protection of related rights. Apart from the Rome convention, a number of other treaties address the protection of related rights: Convention for the Protection of Producers of Phonograms Against Unauthorized Duplication of Their Phonograms (Geneva Phonograms Convention, 1971). Convention Relating to the Distribution of Program–Carrying Signals Transmitted by Satellite (Brussels Convention, 1974). Treaty on Intellectual Property in Respect of Integrated Circuits (IPIC Treaty, 1989). Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS, 1994). WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty (WPPT, 1996). Apart from the TRIPS Agreement, these treaties cannot truly be described as global: the Rome Convention had 83 signatories as of 2006, compared with 162 for the Berne Convention. Relation to authors' rights. Related rights are independent of any authors' rights, as is made clear in the various treaties. Hence a CD recording of a song is concurrently protected by four copyright-type rights: Authors' rights of the composer of the music. Authors' rights of the lyricist. Performers' rights of the singer and musicians. Producers' rights of the person or corporation that made the recording. Performers. The protection of performers is perhaps the strongest and most unified of the related rights. A performer (musician, actor, etc.) has an intellectual input in their performance over and above that of the author of the work. As such, many countries grant moral rights to performers as well as the economic rights covered by the Rome Convention (articles. 7–9), and the rights of paternity and integrity are required by the WPPT (article 5). Performers' rights should not be confused with performing rights, which are the royalties due to the composer for a piece of music under copyright in return for the license (permission) to perform the piece in public. In other words, performers must pay performing rights to composers. Under the Rome Convention (article 7), performers have the right to prevent: The broadcast or communication to the public of their performance, unless this is made from a legally published recording of the performance. The fixation (recording) of their performance. The reproduction of a recording of their performance. The WPPT extends these rights to include the right to license: The distribution of recordings of their performance, for sale or other transfer of ownership (Article 8). The rental of recordings of their performances, unless there is a compulsory license scheme in operation (Article 9). The "making available to the public" of their performances (Article 10), in effect their publication on the internet. Article 14 of the Rome Convention set a minimum term for the protection of performers' rights of twenty years from the end of the year in which the performance was made: the TRIPS Agreement (Article 14.5) has extended this to fifty years. In the European Union, performers' rights last for fifty years from the end of the year of the performance, unless a recording of the performance was published in which case they last for fifty years from the end of the year of publication (Article 3(100 }. In the United States, there is no federal statutory right in unfixed works such as performances, and no federal exclusive right to record a performance; some states, notably California, have performer rights laws, but as of 1988 these remain untested. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/law-school/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/law-school/support

In copyright law, related rights (or neighboring rights) are the rights of a creative work not connected with the work's actual author. It is used in opposition to the term "authors' rights". Neighboring rights is a more literal translation of the original French droits voisins. Both authors' rights and related rights are copyrights in the sense of English or U.S. law. Related rights vary much more widely in scope between different countries than authors' rights. The rights of performers, phonogram producers and broadcasting organizations are certainly covered, and are internationally protected by the Rome Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organizations signed in 1961. Within the European Union, the rights of film producers (as opposed to directors) and database creators are also protected by related rights, and the term is sometimes extended to include the sui generis rights in semiconductor topologies and other industrial design rights. A practical definition is that related rights are copyright-type rights that are not covered by the Berne Convention. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/law-school/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/law-school/support

Moral rights are rights of creators of copyrighted works generally recognized in civil law jurisdictions and, to a lesser extent, in some common law jurisdictions. Moral rights apply only to literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works, and also to films (where the director enjoys moral rights). The most important exceptions to be aware of are computer programs and employees. In most situations employees do not enjoy moral rights. The moral rights include the right of attribution, the right to have a work published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the right to the integrity of the work. The preservation of the integrity of the work allows the author to object to alteration, distortion, or mutilation of the work that is "prejudicial to the author's honor or reputation". Anything else that may detract from the artist's relationship with the work even after it leaves the artist's possession or ownership may bring these moral rights into play. Moral rights are distinct from any economic rights tied to copyrights. Even if an artist has assigned his or her copyright rights to a work to a third party, he or she still maintains the moral rights to the work. Moral rights were first recognized in France and Germany, before they were included in the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works in 1928. Canada recognizes moral rights (droits moraux) in its Copyright Act (Loi sur le droit d'auteur). The United States became a signatory to the convention in 1989, and incorporated a version of moral rights under its copyright law under Title 17 of the U.S. Code. Some jurisdictions allow for the waiver of moral rights. In the United States, the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (VARA) recognizes moral rights, but applies only to a narrow subset of works of visual art. "For the purposes of VARA, visual art includes paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and photographs, existing in a single copy or a limited edition of 200 signed and numbered copies or fewer". A photograph must be taken only for exhibition purposes to be recognized under this subcategory. Independent art is not a focus of this waiver, for VARA only works in protecting artwork that can be considered as having "recognized stature;" Some of the items that are voided from VARA's protection include posters, maps, globes, motion pictures, electronic publications, and applied art. The VARA grants artists two specific rights. The first is the right of attribution. This allows an author to avoid the misattribution of their work and allows their ownership to remain anonymous. The second is the right of integrity does its best to prevent distortion or modification of their work. This right can ease an artist in their worries surrounding negative defamation directly applied to their work and their reputation. The artist's work cannot be transferable after death, the end only with the life of the author. They can, however, waive their moral rights if done so in writing. Some jurisdictions like Austria differentiate between narrow and wide moral rights. Whilst the former is about integrity of the work, the latter limits usages, which may harm the author's integrity. Some copyright timestamp services allow an author to publish allowed and disallowed usage intentions to prevent a violation of such wider moral rights. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/law-school/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/law-school/support

Episode ninety-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" by The Tokens, and at a seventy-year-long story of powerful people repeatedly ripping off less powerful people, then themselves being ripped off in turn by more powerful people, and at how racism meant that a song that earned fifteen million dollars for other people paid its composer ten shillings. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Tossin' and Turnin'" by Bobby Lewis.   Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/   ----more----   ERRATUM: I say “Picture in Your Wallet” when I mean “Picture in My Wallet”.   Resources   As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.    Rian Malan's 2000 article on Solomon Linda and The Lion Sleeps Tonight can be found here.   This 2019 article brings the story of the legal disputes up to date.   The information about isicathamiya comes from Nightsong: Performance, Power and Practice in South Africa by Veit Erlmann.   This collection of early isicathamiya and Mbube music includes several tracks by the Evening Birds.   Information on Pete Seeger and the Weavers primarily comes from Pete Seeger vs. The Un-Americans: A Tale of the Blacklist by Edward Renehan.   This collection has everything the Weavers recorded before their first split.   This is the record of one of the legal actions taken during Weiss' dispute with Folkways in the late eighties and early nineties.   Information on the Tokens came from This is My Story.   There are, surprisingly, no budget compilations of the Tokens' music, but this best-of has everything you need.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript   Today we're going to look at a song that became a worldwide hit in multiple versions, and which I can guarantee everyone listening to this podcast has heard many times. A song that has been recorded by REM, that featured in a Disney musical, and which can be traced back from a white doo-wop group through a group of Communist folk singers to a man who was exploited by racist South African society -- a man who invented an entire genre of music, which got named after his most famous song, but who never saw any of the millions that his song earned for others, and died in poverty. We're going to look at the story of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight":   [Excerpt: The Tokens, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"]   The story of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" is a story that goes back to 1939, when a singer called Solomon Linda was performing in South Africa. Linda was a Zulu, and thus in the racist regime of South Africa was largely without rights. Linda was, in the thirties and forties, probably the single most important performer in South Africa. He was the leader of a vocal group called the Evening Birds, who were the most popular isicathamiya group in South Africa.   Isicathamiya -- and I hope I'm pronouncing that right -- was a form of music which has a lot of parallels to some of the American vocal group music we've looked at, largely because it comes from some of the same roots. I don't pretend to be an expert on the music by any means -- I'll put a link on the podcast webpage to a book which has far more information about this -- but as best I understand it, it's a music created when rural black people were forcibly displaced in the late nineteenth century and forced to find work in the city.   Those people combined elements of traditional Zulu music with two more Western elements. The first was the religious music that they heard from Church missions, and the second was American minstrel songs, heard from troupes of minstrels that toured the country, especially a black performer named Orpheus McAdoo, who led a troupe of minstrel and gospel performers who toured South Africa a lot in the late nineteenth century.   This new style of music was usually performed a capella, though sometimes there might be a single instrument added, and it gained a relatively formalised structure -- it would almost always have very specific parts based on European choral music, with parts for a tenor, a soprano, an alto, and a bass, in strict four-part harmony -- though the soprano and alto parts would be sung in falsetto by men. It would usually be based around the same I, IV, and V chords that most Western popular music was based on, and the Zulu language would often be distorted to fit Western metres, though the music was still more freeform than most of the Western music of the time.   This music started to be recorded in around 1930, and you can get an idea of the stylistic range from two examples. Here's "Umteto we Land Act" by Caluza's Double Quartet:   [Excerpt, "Umteto We Land Act", Caluza's Double Quartet"]   While here's the Bantu Glee Singers, singing "Jim Takata Kanjani":   [Excerpt: The Bantu Glee Singers, "Jim Takata Kanjani"]   Solomon Linda's group, the Evening Birds, sang in this style, but incorporated a number of innovations. One was that they dressed differently -- they wore matching striped suits, rather than the baggy trousers that the older groups wore -- but also, they had extra bass singers. Up until this point, there would be four singers or multiples of four, with one singer singing each part. The Evening Birds, at Linda's instigation, had a much thicker bass part, and in some ways prefigured the sound of doo-wop that would take over in America twenty years later.   Their music was often political -- while the South African regime was horribly oppressive in the thirties, it wasn't as oppressive as it later became, and a certain amount of criticism of the government was allowed in ways it wouldn't be in future decades.   At the time, the main way in which this music would be performed was at contests with several groups, most of whom would be performing the same repertoire. An audience member would offer to pay one of the groups a few pennies to start singing -- and then another audience member, when they got bored with the first group, would offer that group some more money to stop singing, before someone else offered another group some money. The Evening Birds quickly became the centre of this scene, and between 1933 and 1948, when they split, they were the most popular group around. As with many of the doo-wop groups they so resembled, they had a revolving lineup with members coming and going, and joining other groups like the Crocodiles and the Dundee Wandering Singers. There was even a second group called the Evening Birds, with a singer who sounded like Linda, and who had a long-running feud with Linda's group.   But it wasn't this popularity that got the Evening Birds recorded. It was because Solomon Linda got a day job packing records for Gallo Records, the only record label in South Africa, which owned the only recording studio in sub-Saharan Africa. While he was working in their factory, packing records, he managed to get the group signed to make some records themselves. In the group's second session, they recorded a song that Linda had written, called "Mbube", which means "lion", and was about hunting the lions that would feed on his family's cattle when he was growing up:   [Excerpt: Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds, "Mbube"]   There's some dispute as to whether Linda wrote the whole song, or whether it's based on a traditional Zulu song -- I tend to fall on the side of Linda having written the whole thing, because very often when people say something is based on a traditional song, what they actually mean is "I don't believe that an uneducated or black person can have written a whole song".   But whatever the circumstances of most of the composition, one thing is definitely known – Linda was the one who came up with this falsetto melody:   [Excerpt: Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds, "Mbube"]   The song became massively, massively popular -- so popular that eventually the master copy of the record disintegrated, as they'd pressed so many copies from it. It gave its name to a whole genre of music -- in the same way that late fifties American vocal groups are doo-wop groups, South African groups like Ladysmith Black Mambazo are, more than eighty years later, still known as "mbube groups".   Linda and the Evening Birds would make many more records, like "Anodu Gonda":   [Excerpt: Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds, "Anodu Gonda"]   But it was "Mbube" that was their biggest hit. It sold a hundred thousand copies on Gallo Records -- and earned Solomon Linda, its writer and lead singer, ten shillings. The South African government at the time estimated that a black family could survive on thirty-seven shillings and sixpence a week. So for writing the most famous melody ever to come out of Africa, Linda got a quarter of a week's poverty-level wages. When Linda died in 1962, he had a hundred rand -- equivalent then to fifty British pounds -- in his bank account. He was buried in an unmarked grave.   And, a little over a year before his death, his song had become an international number one hit record. To see why, we have to go back to 1952, and a folk group called the Weavers.   Pete Seeger, the most important member of the Weavers, is a figure who is hugely important in the history of the folk music rebirth of the 1960s. Like most of the white folk singers of the period, he had an incredibly privileged background -- he had attended Harvard as a classmate of John F Kennedy -- but he also had very strong socialist principles. He had been friends with both Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly in the forties, and he dedicated his later career to the same kind of left-wing activism that Guthrie had taken part in.    Indeed, Guthrie and Seeger had both been members of the Almanac Singers, a folk group of the forties who had been explicitly pro-Communist. They'd been pacifists up until the Soviet entry into the Second World War, at which point they had immediately turned round and become the biggest cheerleaders of the war:   [Excerpt: The Almanac Singers, "Round and Round Hitler's Grave"]   The Almanac Singers had a revolving door membership, including everyone from Burl Ives to Cisco Houston at one point or another, but the core of the group had been Seeger and Lee Hays, and those two had eventually formed another group, more or less as a continuation of the Almanac Singers, but with a less explicitly political agenda -- they would perform Guthrie and Lead Belly songs, and songs they wrote themselves, but not be tied to performing music that fit the ideological line of the Communist Party.   The Weavers immediately had far more commercial success than the Almanac Singers ever had, and recorded such hits as their version of Lead Belly's "Goodnight Irene", with orchestration by Gordon Jenkins:   [Excerpt: The Weavers, "Goodnight Irene"]   And one of the hits they recorded was a version of "Mbube", which they titled "Wimoweh".   Alan Lomax, the folk song collector, had discovered somewhere a big stack of African records, which were about to be thrown out, and he thought to himself that those would be exactly the kind of thing that Pete Seeger might want, and gave them to him. Seeger loved the recording of "Mbube", but neither man had any clear idea of what the song was or where it came from. Seeger couldn't make out the lyrics -- he thought Linda was singing something like "Wimoweh", and he created a new arrangement of the song, taking Linda's melody from the end of the song and singing it repeatedly throughout:   [Excerpt: The Weavers, "Wimoweh"]   At the time, the Weavers were signed as songwriters to Folkways, a company that was set up to promote folk music, but was part of a much bigger conglomerate, The Richmond Organisation. When they were informed that the Weavers were going to record "Wimoweh", Folkways contacted the South African record company and were informed that "Mbube" was a traditional folk song. So Folkways copyrighted "Mbube", as "Wimoweh", in the name Paul Campbell -- a collective pseudonym that the Weavers used for their arrangements of traditional songs.   Shortly after this, Gallo realised their mistake and tried to copyright "Mbube" themselves in the USA, under Solomon Linda's name, only to be told that Folkways already had the copyright. Now, in the 1950s the USA was not yet a signatory to the Berne Convention, the international agreement on copyright laws, and so it made no difference that in South Africa the song had been copyrighted under Linda's name -- in the USA it was owned by Folkways, because they had registered it first.   But Folkways wanted the rights for other countries, too, and so they came to an agreement with Gallo that would be to Gallo's immense disadvantage. Because they agreed that they would pay Gallo a modest one-off fee, and "let" Gallo have the rights to the song in a few territories in Africa, and in return Folkways would get the copyright everywhere else. Gallo agreed, and so "Mbube" by Solomon Linda and "Wimoweh" by Paul Campbell became separate copyrights -- Gallo had, without realising it, given up their legal rights to the song throughout the world.   "Wimoweh" by the Weavers went to number six on the charts, but then Senator McCarthy stepped in. Both Pete Seeger and Lee Hays had been named as past Communist Party members, and were called before the House Unamerican Activities Committee to testify. Hays stood on his fifth amendment rights, refusing to testify against himself, but Seeger took the riskier option of simply refusing on first amendment grounds. He said, quite rightly, that his political activities, voting history, and party membership were nobody's business except his, and he wasn't going to testify about them in front of Congress. He spent much of the next decade with the threat of prison hanging over his head.   As a result, the Weavers were blacklisted from radio and TV, as was Seeger as a solo artist. "Wimoweh" dropped off the charts, and the group's recording catalogue was deleted. The group split up, though they did get back together again a few years later, and managed to have a hit live album of a concert they performed at Carnegie Hall in 1955, which also included "Wimoweh":   [Excerpt: The Weavers, "Wimoweh (live at Carnegie Hall)"]   Seeger left the group permanently a couple of years after that, when they did a commercial for tobacco -- the group were still blacklisted from the radio and TV, and saw it as an opportunity to get some exposure, but Seeger didn't approve of tobacco or advertising, and quit the group because of it -- though because he'd made a commitment to the group, he did appear on the commercial, not wanting to break his word. At his suggestion, he was replaced by Erik Darling, from another folk group, The Tarriers. Darling was an Ayn Rand fan and a libertarian, so presumably didn't have the same attitudes towards advertising.   As you might have gathered from this, Seeger was a man of strong principles, and so you might be surprised that he would take credit for someone else's song. As it turned out, he didn't. When he discovered that Solomon Linda had written the song, that it wasn't just a traditional song, he insisted that all future money he would have made from it go to Linda, and sent Linda a cheque for a thousand dollars for the money he'd already earned. But Seeger was someone who didn't care much about money at all -- he donated the vast majority of his money to worthy causes, and lived frugally, and he assumed that the people he was working with would behave honourably and keep to agreements, and didn't bother checking on them. They didn't, and Linda saw nothing from them.   Over the years after 1952, "Wimoweh" became something of a standard in America, with successful versions like the one by Yma Sumac:   [Excerpt: Yma Sumac, "Wimoweh"]   And in the early sixties it was in the repertoire of almost every folk group, being recorded by groups like the Kingston Trio, who had taken the Weavers' place as the most popular folk group in the country.   And then the Tokens entered the picture. We've mentioned the Tokens before, in the episode on "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" -- they were the group, also known as the Linc-Tones, that was led by Carole King's friend Neil Sedaka, and who'd recorded "While I Dream" with Sedaka on lead vocals:   [Excerpt: Neil Sedaka and the Tokens, "While I Dream"]   After recording that, one member of the group had gone off to college, and been replaced by the falsetto singer Jay Siegel. But then the group had split up, and Sedaka had gone on to a very successful career as a solo performer and a songwriter.  But Siegel and one of the other group members, Hank Medress, had carried on performing together, and had formed a new group, Darrell and the Oxfords, with two other singers. That group had made a couple of records for Roulette Records, one of which, "Picture in Your Wallet", was a local hit:   [Excerpt: Darrell and the Oxfords, "Picture in Your Wallet"]   But that group had also split up. So the duo invited yet another pair of singers to join them -- Mitch Margo, who was around their age, in his late teens, and his twelve-year-old brother Phil. The group reverted to their old name of The Tokens, and recorded a song called "Tonight I Fell In Love", which they leased to a small label called Warwick Records:   [Excerpt: The Tokens, "Tonight I Fell In Love"]   Warwick Records sat on the track for six months before releasing it. When they did, in 1961, it went to number fifteen on the charts. But by then, the group had signed to RCA Records, and were now working with Hugo and Luigi, the production duo who you might remember from the episode on "Shout".   The group put out a couple of flop singles on RCA, including a remake of the Moonglows' "Sincerely":   [Excerpt: The Tokens, "Sincerely"]   But after those two singles flopped, the group made the record that would define them for the rest of their lives. The Tokens had been performing "Wimoweh" in their stage act, and they played it for Hugo and Luigi, who thought there was something there, but they didn't think it would be commercial as it was. They decided to get a professional writer in to fix the song up, and called in George David Weiss, a writer with whom they'd worked before. The three of them had previously co-written "Can't Help Falling In Love" for Elvis Presley, basing it on a traditional melody, which is what they thought they were doing here:   [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Can't Help Falling In Love"]   Weiss took the song home and reworked it. Weiss decided to find out what the original lyrics had been about, and apparently asked the South African consulate, who told him that it was about lions, so he came up with new lyrics -- "in the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight".   Hugo and Luigi came up with an arrangement for Weiss' new version of the song, and brought in an opera singer named Anita Darian to replicate the part that Yma Sumac had sung on her version. The song was recorded, and released on the B-side of the Tokens' third flop in a row:   [Excerpt: The Tokens, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"]   As it was believed by everyone involved that the song was a traditional one, the new song was copyrighted in the names of Weiss, Hugo, and Luigi. And as it was released as a B-side of a flop single, nobody cared at first.   But then a DJ flipped the record and started playing the B-side, and suddenly the song was a hit. Indeed, it went to number one. And it didn't just go to number one, it became a standard, recorded over the years by everyone from Brian Eno to Billy Joel, The New Christy Minstrels to They Might Be Giants.   Obviously, the publishers of "Wimoweh", who knew that the song wasn't a traditional piece at all, wanted to get their share of the money. However, the owner of the publishing company was also a good friend of Weiss -- and Weiss was someone who had a lot of influence in the industry, and who nobody wanted to upset, and so they came to a very amicable agreement. The three credited songwriters would stay credited as the songwriters and keep all the songwriting money -- after all, Pete Seeger didn't want it, and the publishers were only under a moral obligation to Solomon Linda, not a legal one -- but the Richmond Organisation would get the publishing money.   Everyone seemed to be satisfied with the arrangement, and Solomon Linda's song went on earning a lot of money for a lot of white men he never met.   The Tokens tried to follow up with a version of an actual African folk song, "Bwa Nina", but that wasn't a hit, and nor was a version of "La Bamba". While they continued their career for decades, the only hit they had as performers was in 1973, by which point Hank Medress had left and the other three had changed their name to Cross Country and had a hit with a remake of "In the Midnight Hour":   [Excerpt: Cross Country, "The Midnight Hour"]   I say that was the only hit they had as performers, because they went into record production themselves. There they were far more successful, and as a group they produced records like the Chiffons' "He's So Fine", making them the first vocal group to produce a hit for another vocal group:   [Excerpt: The Chiffons, "He's So Fine"]   That song would, of course, generate its own famous authorial dispute case in later years. After Hank Medress left the group, he worked as a producer on his own, producing hits for Tony Orlando and Dawn, and also producing one of the later hit versions of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", Robert John's version, which made number three in 1972:   [Excerpt: Robert John, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"]   Today there are two touring versions of the Tokens, one led by Jay Siegel and one by Phil Margo.   But while in 1961 the Richmond Organisation, Hugo and Luigi, and George Weiss all seemed happy with their agreement, things started to go wrong in 1989.   American copyright law has had several changes over the years, and nothing of what I'm saying applies now, but for songs written before 1978 and the first of the Mickey Mouse copyright extensions, the rule used to be that a song would be in copyright for twenty-eight years. The writer could then renew it for a second twenty-eight-year term. (The rule is now that songs published in America remain in copyright until seventy years after the writer's death).    And it's specifically the *writer* who could renew it for that second term, not the publishers. George Weiss filed notice that he was going to renew the copyright when the twenty-eight-year term expired, and that he wasn't going to let the Richmond Organisation publish the song.   As soon as the Richmond Organisation heard about this, they took Weiss to court, saying that he couldn't take the publishing rights away from them, because the song was based on "Wimoweh", which they owned. Weiss argued that if the song was based on "Wimoweh", the copyright should have reflected that for the twenty-eight years that the Richmond Organisation owned it. They'd signed papers agreeing that Weiss and Hugo and Luigi were the writers, and if they'd had a problem with that they should have said so back in 1961.   The courts sided with Weiss, but they did say that the Richmond Organisation might have had a bit of a point about the song's similarity to "Wimoweh", so they had to pay a small amount of money to Solomon Linda's family.   And the American writers getting the song back coincided with two big boosts in the income from the song. First, R.E.M recorded a song called "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite", on their album Automatic For the People (a record we will definitely be talking about in 2026, assuming I'm still around and able to do the podcast by then). The album was one of the biggest records of the decade, and on the song, Michael Stipe sang a fragment of Solomon Linda's melody:   [Excerpt: R.E.M. "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite"]   The owners of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" took legal action about that, and got themselves credited as co-writers of R.E.M.'s song, and the group also had to record "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", releasing it as a B-side to the hit single version of "Sidewinder":   [Excerpt: R.E.M. "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"]   Even better from their point of view, the song was featured in the Disney film The Lion King, which on its release in 1994 became the second highest-grossing film of all time and the most successful animated film ever, and in its Broadway adaptation, which became the most successful Broadway show of all time.   And in 2000, Rian Malan, a South African journalist based in America, who mostly dedicated his work to expunging his ancestral guilt -- he's a relative of Daniel Malan, the South African dictator who instituted the apartheid system, and of Magnus Malan, one of the more monstrous ministers in the regime in its last days of the eighties and early nineties -- found out that while Solomon Linda's family had been getting some money, it amounted at most to a couple of thousand dollars a year, shared between Linda's daughters. At the same time, Malan estimated that over the years the song had generated something in the region of fifteen million dollars for its American copyright owners.   Malan published an article about this, and just before that, the daughters got a minor windfall -- Pete Seeger noticed a six thousand dollar payment, which came to him when a commercial used "Wimoweh", rather than "The Lion Sleeps Tonight". He realised that he'd been receiving the royalties for "Wimoweh" all along, even though he'd asked that they be sent to Linda, so he totalled up how much he'd earned from the song over the years, which came to twelve thousand dollars, and he sent a cheque for that amount to Linda's daughters.   Those daughters were living in such poverty that in 2001, one of the four died of AIDS -- a disease which would have been completely treatable if she'd been able to afford the anti-retroviral medication to treat it.   The surviving sisters were told that the copyright in "Mbube" should have reverted to them in the eighties, and that they had a very good case under South African law to get a proper share of the rights to both "Wimoweh" and "The Lion Sleeps Tonight".   They just needed to find someone in South Africa that they could sue. Abilene Music, the current owners of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", were based in the USA and had no assets in South Africa. Suing them would be pointless. But they could sue someone else:   [Excerpt: Timon and Pumbaa, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"]   Disney had assets in South Africa. Lots of them. And they'd used Solomon Linda's song in their film, which under South African law would be copyright infringement. It would even be possible, if the case went really badly for Disney, that Linda's family could get total ownership of all Disney assets in South Africa.   So in 2006, Disney came to an out of court settlement with Linda's family, and they appear to have pressured Abilene Music to do the same thing. Under South African law, "Mbube" would go out of copyright by 2012, but it was agreed that Linda's daughters would receive royalties on "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" until 2017, even after the South African copyright had expired, and they would get a lump sum from Disney. The money they were owed would be paid into a trust.   After 2017, they would still get money from "Wimoweh", but not from "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", whose rights would revert fully to its American owners.   Unfortunately, most of the money they got seems to have gone on legal bills. The three surviving sisters each received, in total, about eighty-three thousand dollars over the ten-year course of the agreement after those bills, which is much, much, more than they were getting before, but only a fraction of what the song would have earned them if they'd been paid properly.   In 2017, the year the agreement expired, Disney announced they were making a photorealistic CGI remake of The Lion King. That, too, featured "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", and that, too, became the most successful animated film of all time. Under American copyright law, "Wimoweh" will remain in copyright until 2047, unless further changes are made to the law. Solomon Linda's family will continue to receive royalties on that song. "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", the much more successful song, will remain in copyright until 2057, and the money from that will mostly go to Claire Weiss-Creatore, who was George Weiss' third wife, and who after he died in 2010 became the third wife of Luigi Creatore, of Hugo and Luigi, who died himself in 2015. Solomon Linda's daughters won't see a penny of it.   According to George Weiss' obituary in the Guardian, he "was a familiar figure at congressional hearings into copyright reform and music piracy, testifying as to the vital importance of intellectual property protection for composers".  

Episode ninety-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by The Tokens, and at a seventy-year-long story of powerful people repeatedly ripping off less powerful people, then themselves being ripped off in turn by more powerful people, and at how racism meant that a song that earned fifteen million dollars for other people paid its composer ten shillings. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Tossin’ and Turnin'” by Bobby Lewis.   Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/   —-more—-   ERRATUM: I say “Picture in Your Wallet” when I mean “Picture in My Wallet”.   Resources   As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.    Rian Malan’s 2000 article on Solomon Linda and The Lion Sleeps Tonight can be found here.   This 2019 article brings the story of the legal disputes up to date.   The information about isicathamiya comes from Nightsong: Performance, Power and Practice in South Africa by Veit Erlmann.   This collection of early isicathamiya and Mbube music includes several tracks by the Evening Birds.   Information on Pete Seeger and the Weavers primarily comes from Pete Seeger vs. The Un-Americans: A Tale of the Blacklist by Edward Renehan.   This collection has everything the Weavers recorded before their first split.   This is the record of one of the legal actions taken during Weiss’ dispute with Folkways in the late eighties and early nineties.   Information on the Tokens came from This is My Story.   There are, surprisingly, no budget compilations of the Tokens’ music, but this best-of has everything you need.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript   Today we’re going to look at a song that became a worldwide hit in multiple versions, and which I can guarantee everyone listening to this podcast has heard many times. A song that has been recorded by REM, that featured in a Disney musical, and which can be traced back from a white doo-wop group through a group of Communist folk singers to a man who was exploited by racist South African society — a man who invented an entire genre of music, which got named after his most famous song, but who never saw any of the millions that his song earned for others, and died in poverty. We’re going to look at the story of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”:   [Excerpt: The Tokens, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”]   The story of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” is a story that goes back to 1939, when a singer called Solomon Linda was performing in South Africa. Linda was a Zulu, and thus in the racist regime of South Africa was largely without rights. Linda was, in the thirties and forties, probably the single most important performer in South Africa. He was the leader of a vocal group called the Evening Birds, who were the most popular isicathamiya group in South Africa.   Isicathamiya — and I hope I’m pronouncing that right — was a form of music which has a lot of parallels to some of the American vocal group music we’ve looked at, largely because it comes from some of the same roots. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the music by any means — I’ll put a link on the podcast webpage to a book which has far more information about this — but as best I understand it, it’s a music created when rural black people were forcibly displaced in the late nineteenth century and forced to find work in the city.   Those people combined elements of traditional Zulu music with two more Western elements. The first was the religious music that they heard from Church missions, and the second was American minstrel songs, heard from troupes of minstrels that toured the country, especially a black performer named Orpheus McAdoo, who led a troupe of minstrel and gospel performers who toured South Africa a lot in the late nineteenth century.   This new style of music was usually performed a capella, though sometimes there might be a single instrument added, and it gained a relatively formalised structure — it would almost always have very specific parts based on European choral music, with parts for a tenor, a soprano, an alto, and a bass, in strict four-part harmony — though the soprano and alto parts would be sung in falsetto by men. It would usually be based around the same I, IV, and V chords that most Western popular music was based on, and the Zulu language would often be distorted to fit Western metres, though the music was still more freeform than most of the Western music of the time.   This music started to be recorded in around 1930, and you can get an idea of the stylistic range from two examples. Here’s “Umteto we Land Act” by Caluza’s Double Quartet:   [Excerpt, “Umteto We Land Act”, Caluza’s Double Quartet”]   While here’s the Bantu Glee Singers, singing “Jim Takata Kanjani”:   [Excerpt: The Bantu Glee Singers, “Jim Takata Kanjani”]   Solomon Linda’s group, the Evening Birds, sang in this style, but incorporated a number of innovations. One was that they dressed differently — they wore matching striped suits, rather than the baggy trousers that the older groups wore — but also, they had extra bass singers. Up until this point, there would be four singers or multiples of four, with one singer singing each part. The Evening Birds, at Linda’s instigation, had a much thicker bass part, and in some ways prefigured the sound of doo-wop that would take over in America twenty years later.   Their music was often political — while the South African regime was horribly oppressive in the thirties, it wasn’t as oppressive as it later became, and a certain amount of criticism of the government was allowed in ways it wouldn’t be in future decades.   At the time, the main way in which this music would be performed was at contests with several groups, most of whom would be performing the same repertoire. An audience member would offer to pay one of the groups a few pennies to start singing — and then another audience member, when they got bored with the first group, would offer that group some more money to stop singing, before someone else offered another group some money. The Evening Birds quickly became the centre of this scene, and between 1933 and 1948, when they split, they were the most popular group around. As with many of the doo-wop groups they so resembled, they had a revolving lineup with members coming and going, and joining other groups like the Crocodiles and the Dundee Wandering Singers. There was even a second group called the Evening Birds, with a singer who sounded like Linda, and who had a long-running feud with Linda’s group.   But it wasn’t this popularity that got the Evening Birds recorded. It was because Solomon Linda got a day job packing records for Gallo Records, the only record label in South Africa, which owned the only recording studio in sub-Saharan Africa. While he was working in their factory, packing records, he managed to get the group signed to make some records themselves. In the group’s second session, they recorded a song that Linda had written, called “Mbube”, which means “lion”, and was about hunting the lions that would feed on his family’s cattle when he was growing up:   [Excerpt: Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds, “Mbube”]   There’s some dispute as to whether Linda wrote the whole song, or whether it’s based on a traditional Zulu song — I tend to fall on the side of Linda having written the whole thing, because very often when people say something is based on a traditional song, what they actually mean is “I don’t believe that an uneducated or black person can have written a whole song”.   But whatever the circumstances of most of the composition, one thing is definitely known – Linda was the one who came up with this falsetto melody:   [Excerpt: Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds, “Mbube”]   The song became massively, massively popular — so popular that eventually the master copy of the record disintegrated, as they’d pressed so many copies from it. It gave its name to a whole genre of music — in the same way that late fifties American vocal groups are doo-wop groups, South African groups like Ladysmith Black Mambazo are, more than eighty years later, still known as “mbube groups”.   Linda and the Evening Birds would make many more records, like “Anodu Gonda”:   [Excerpt: Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds, “Anodu Gonda”]   But it was “Mbube” that was their biggest hit. It sold a hundred thousand copies on Gallo Records — and earned Solomon Linda, its writer and lead singer, ten shillings. The South African government at the time estimated that a black family could survive on thirty-seven shillings and sixpence a week. So for writing the most famous melody ever to come out of Africa, Linda got a quarter of a week’s poverty-level wages. When Linda died in 1962, he had a hundred rand — equivalent then to fifty British pounds — in his bank account. He was buried in an unmarked grave.   And, a little over a year before his death, his song had become an international number one hit record. To see why, we have to go back to 1952, and a folk group called the Weavers.   Pete Seeger, the most important member of the Weavers, is a figure who is hugely important in the history of the folk music rebirth of the 1960s. Like most of the white folk singers of the period, he had an incredibly privileged background — he had attended Harvard as a classmate of John F Kennedy — but he also had very strong socialist principles. He had been friends with both Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly in the forties, and he dedicated his later career to the same kind of left-wing activism that Guthrie had taken part in.    Indeed, Guthrie and Seeger had both been members of the Almanac Singers, a folk group of the forties who had been explicitly pro-Communist. They’d been pacifists up until the Soviet entry into the Second World War, at which point they had immediately turned round and become the biggest cheerleaders of the war:   [Excerpt: The Almanac Singers, “Round and Round Hitler’s Grave”]   The Almanac Singers had a revolving door membership, including everyone from Burl Ives to Cisco Houston at one point or another, but the core of the group had been Seeger and Lee Hays, and those two had eventually formed another group, more or less as a continuation of the Almanac Singers, but with a less explicitly political agenda — they would perform Guthrie and Lead Belly songs, and songs they wrote themselves, but not be tied to performing music that fit the ideological line of the Communist Party.   The Weavers immediately had far more commercial success than the Almanac Singers ever had, and recorded such hits as their version of Lead Belly’s “Goodnight Irene”, with orchestration by Gordon Jenkins:   [Excerpt: The Weavers, “Goodnight Irene”]   And one of the hits they recorded was a version of “Mbube”, which they titled “Wimoweh”.   Alan Lomax, the folk song collector, had discovered somewhere a big stack of African records, which were about to be thrown out, and he thought to himself that those would be exactly the kind of thing that Pete Seeger might want, and gave them to him. Seeger loved the recording of “Mbube”, but neither man had any clear idea of what the song was or where it came from. Seeger couldn’t make out the lyrics — he thought Linda was singing something like “Wimoweh”, and he created a new arrangement of the song, taking Linda’s melody from the end of the song and singing it repeatedly throughout:   [Excerpt: The Weavers, “Wimoweh”]   At the time, the Weavers were signed as songwriters to Folkways, a company that was set up to promote folk music, but was part of a much bigger conglomerate, The Richmond Organisation. When they were informed that the Weavers were going to record “Wimoweh”, Folkways contacted the South African record company and were informed that “Mbube” was a traditional folk song. So Folkways copyrighted “Mbube”, as “Wimoweh”, in the name Paul Campbell — a collective pseudonym that the Weavers used for their arrangements of traditional songs.   Shortly after this, Gallo realised their mistake and tried to copyright “Mbube” themselves in the USA, under Solomon Linda’s name, only to be told that Folkways already had the copyright. Now, in the 1950s the USA was not yet a signatory to the Berne Convention, the international agreement on copyright laws, and so it made no difference that in South Africa the song had been copyrighted under Linda’s name — in the USA it was owned by Folkways, because they had registered it first.   But Folkways wanted the rights for other countries, too, and so they came to an agreement with Gallo that would be to Gallo’s immense disadvantage. Because they agreed that they would pay Gallo a modest one-off fee, and “let” Gallo have the rights to the song in a few territories in Africa, and in return Folkways would get the copyright everywhere else. Gallo agreed, and so “Mbube” by Solomon Linda and “Wimoweh” by Paul Campbell became separate copyrights — Gallo had, without realising it, given up their legal rights to the song throughout the world.   “Wimoweh” by the Weavers went to number six on the charts, but then Senator McCarthy stepped in. Both Pete Seeger and Lee Hays had been named as past Communist Party members, and were called before the House Unamerican Activities Committee to testify. Hays stood on his fifth amendment rights, refusing to testify against himself, but Seeger took the riskier option of simply refusing on first amendment grounds. He said, quite rightly, that his political activities, voting history, and party membership were nobody’s business except his, and he wasn’t going to testify about them in front of Congress. He spent much of the next decade with the threat of prison hanging over his head.   As a result, the Weavers were blacklisted from radio and TV, as was Seeger as a solo artist. “Wimoweh” dropped off the charts, and the group’s recording catalogue was deleted. The group split up, though they did get back together again a few years later, and managed to have a hit live album of a concert they performed at Carnegie Hall in 1955, which also included “Wimoweh”:   [Excerpt: The Weavers, “Wimoweh (live at Carnegie Hall)”]   Seeger left the group permanently a couple of years after that, when they did a commercial for tobacco — the group were still blacklisted from the radio and TV, and saw it as an opportunity to get some exposure, but Seeger didn’t approve of tobacco or advertising, and quit the group because of it — though because he’d made a commitment to the group, he did appear on the commercial, not wanting to break his word. At his suggestion, he was replaced by Erik Darling, from another folk group, The Tarriers. Darling was an Ayn Rand fan and a libertarian, so presumably didn’t have the same attitudes towards advertising.   As you might have gathered from this, Seeger was a man of strong principles, and so you might be surprised that he would take credit for someone else’s song. As it turned out, he didn’t. When he discovered that Solomon Linda had written the song, that it wasn’t just a traditional song, he insisted that all future money he would have made from it go to Linda, and sent Linda a cheque for a thousand dollars for the money he’d already earned. But Seeger was someone who didn’t care much about money at all — he donated the vast majority of his money to worthy causes, and lived frugally, and he assumed that the people he was working with would behave honourably and keep to agreements, and didn’t bother checking on them. They didn’t, and Linda saw nothing from them.   Over the years after 1952, “Wimoweh” became something of a standard in America, with successful versions like the one by Yma Sumac:   [Excerpt: Yma Sumac, “Wimoweh”]   And in the early sixties it was in the repertoire of almost every folk group, being recorded by groups like the Kingston Trio, who had taken the Weavers’ place as the most popular folk group in the country.   And then the Tokens entered the picture. We’ve mentioned the Tokens before, in the episode on “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” — they were the group, also known as the Linc-Tones, that was led by Carole King’s friend Neil Sedaka, and who’d recorded “While I Dream” with Sedaka on lead vocals:   [Excerpt: Neil Sedaka and the Tokens, “While I Dream”]   After recording that, one member of the group had gone off to college, and been replaced by the falsetto singer Jay Siegel. But then the group had split up, and Sedaka had gone on to a very successful career as a solo performer and a songwriter.  But Siegel and one of the other group members, Hank Medress, had carried on performing together, and had formed a new group, Darrell and the Oxfords, with two other singers. That group had made a couple of records for Roulette Records, one of which, “Picture in Your Wallet”, was a local hit:   [Excerpt: Darrell and the Oxfords, “Picture in Your Wallet”]   But that group had also split up. So the duo invited yet another pair of singers to join them — Mitch Margo, who was around their age, in his late teens, and his twelve-year-old brother Phil. The group reverted to their old name of The Tokens, and recorded a song called “Tonight I Fell In Love”, which they leased to a small label called Warwick Records:   [Excerpt: The Tokens, “Tonight I Fell In Love”]   Warwick Records sat on the track for six months before releasing it. When they did, in 1961, it went to number fifteen on the charts. But by then, the group had signed to RCA Records, and were now working with Hugo and Luigi, the production duo who you might remember from the episode on “Shout”.   The group put out a couple of flop singles on RCA, including a remake of the Moonglows’ “Sincerely”:   [Excerpt: The Tokens, “Sincerely”]   But after those two singles flopped, the group made the record that would define them for the rest of their lives. The Tokens had been performing “Wimoweh” in their stage act, and they played it for Hugo and Luigi, who thought there was something there, but they didn’t think it would be commercial as it was. They decided to get a professional writer in to fix the song up, and called in George David Weiss, a writer with whom they’d worked before. The three of them had previously co-written “Can’t Help Falling In Love” for Elvis Presley, basing it on a traditional melody, which is what they thought they were doing here:   [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Can’t Help Falling In Love”]   Weiss took the song home and reworked it. Weiss decided to find out what the original lyrics had been about, and apparently asked the South African consulate, who told him that it was about lions, so he came up with new lyrics — “in the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight”.   Hugo and Luigi came up with an arrangement for Weiss’ new version of the song, and brought in an opera singer named Anita Darian to replicate the part that Yma Sumac had sung on her version. The song was recorded, and released on the B-side of the Tokens’ third flop in a row:   [Excerpt: The Tokens, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”]   As it was believed by everyone involved that the song was a traditional one, the new song was copyrighted in the names of Weiss, Hugo, and Luigi. And as it was released as a B-side of a flop single, nobody cared at first.   But then a DJ flipped the record and started playing the B-side, and suddenly the song was a hit. Indeed, it went to number one. And it didn’t just go to number one, it became a standard, recorded over the years by everyone from Brian Eno to Billy Joel, The New Christy Minstrels to They Might Be Giants.   Obviously, the publishers of “Wimoweh”, who knew that the song wasn’t a traditional piece at all, wanted to get their share of the money. However, the owner of the publishing company was also a good friend of Weiss — and Weiss was someone who had a lot of influence in the industry, and who nobody wanted to upset, and so they came to a very amicable agreement. The three credited songwriters would stay credited as the songwriters and keep all the songwriting money — after all, Pete Seeger didn’t want it, and the publishers were only under a moral obligation to Solomon Linda, not a legal one — but the Richmond Organisation would get the publishing money.   Everyone seemed to be satisfied with the arrangement, and Solomon Linda’s song went on earning a lot of money for a lot of white men he never met.   The Tokens tried to follow up with a version of an actual African folk song, “Bwa Nina”, but that wasn’t a hit, and nor was a version of “La Bamba”. While they continued their career for decades, the only hit they had as performers was in 1973, by which point Hank Medress had left and the other three had changed their name to Cross Country and had a hit with a remake of “In the Midnight Hour”:   [Excerpt: Cross Country, “The Midnight Hour”]   I say that was the only hit they had as performers, because they went into record production themselves. There they were far more successful, and as a group they produced records like the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine”, making them the first vocal group to produce a hit for another vocal group:   [Excerpt: The Chiffons, “He’s So Fine”]   That song would, of course, generate its own famous authorial dispute case in later years. After Hank Medress left the group, he worked as a producer on his own, producing hits for Tony Orlando and Dawn, and also producing one of the later hit versions of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, Robert John’s version, which made number three in 1972:   [Excerpt: Robert John, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”]   Today there are two touring versions of the Tokens, one led by Jay Siegel and one by Phil Margo.   But while in 1961 the Richmond Organisation, Hugo and Luigi, and George Weiss all seemed happy with their agreement, things started to go wrong in 1989.   American copyright law has had several changes over the years, and nothing of what I’m saying applies now, but for songs written before 1978 and the first of the Mickey Mouse copyright extensions, the rule used to be that a song would be in copyright for twenty-eight years. The writer could then renew it for a second twenty-eight-year term. (The rule is now that songs published in America remain in copyright until seventy years after the writer’s death).    And it’s specifically the *writer* who could renew it for that second term, not the publishers. George Weiss filed notice that he was going to renew the copyright when the twenty-eight-year term expired, and that he wasn’t going to let the Richmond Organisation publish the song.   As soon as the Richmond Organisation heard about this, they took Weiss to court, saying that he couldn’t take the publishing rights away from them, because the song was based on “Wimoweh”, which they owned. Weiss argued that if the song was based on “Wimoweh”, the copyright should have reflected that for the twenty-eight years that the Richmond Organisation owned it. They’d signed papers agreeing that Weiss and Hugo and Luigi were the writers, and if they’d had a problem with that they should have said so back in 1961.   The courts sided with Weiss, but they did say that the Richmond Organisation might have had a bit of a point about the song’s similarity to “Wimoweh”, so they had to pay a small amount of money to Solomon Linda’s family.   And the American writers getting the song back coincided with two big boosts in the income from the song. First, R.E.M recorded a song called “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite”, on their album Automatic For the People (a record we will definitely be talking about in 2026, assuming I’m still around and able to do the podcast by then). The album was one of the biggest records of the decade, and on the song, Michael Stipe sang a fragment of Solomon Linda’s melody:   [Excerpt: R.E.M. “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite”]   The owners of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” took legal action about that, and got themselves credited as co-writers of R.E.M.’s song, and the group also had to record “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, releasing it as a B-side to the hit single version of “Sidewinder”:   [Excerpt: R.E.M. “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”]   Even better from their point of view, the song was featured in the Disney film The Lion King, which on its release in 1994 became the second highest-grossing film of all time and the most successful animated film ever, and in its Broadway adaptation, which became the most successful Broadway show of all time.   And in 2000, Rian Malan, a South African journalist based in America, who mostly dedicated his work to expunging his ancestral guilt — he’s a relative of Daniel Malan, the South African dictator who instituted the apartheid system, and of Magnus Malan, one of the more monstrous ministers in the regime in its last days of the eighties and early nineties — found out that while Solomon Linda’s family had been getting some money, it amounted at most to a couple of thousand dollars a year, shared between Linda’s daughters. At the same time, Malan estimated that over the years the song had generated something in the region of fifteen million dollars for its American copyright owners.   Malan published an article about this, and just before that, the daughters got a minor windfall — Pete Seeger noticed a six thousand dollar payment, which came to him when a commercial used “Wimoweh”, rather than “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”. He realised that he’d been receiving the royalties for “Wimoweh” all along, even though he’d asked that they be sent to Linda, so he totalled up how much he’d earned from the song over the years, which came to twelve thousand dollars, and he sent a cheque for that amount to Linda’s daughters.   Those daughters were living in such poverty that in 2001, one of the four died of AIDS — a disease which would have been completely treatable if she’d been able to afford the anti-retroviral medication to treat it.   The surviving sisters were told that the copyright in “Mbube” should have reverted to them in the eighties, and that they had a very good case under South African law to get a proper share of the rights to both “Wimoweh” and “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”.   They just needed to find someone in South Africa that they could sue. Abilene Music, the current owners of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, were based in the USA and had no assets in South Africa. Suing them would be pointless. But they could sue someone else:   [Excerpt: Timon and Pumbaa, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”]   Disney had assets in South Africa. Lots of them. And they’d used Solomon Linda’s song in their film, which under South African law would be copyright infringement. It would even be possible, if the case went really badly for Disney, that Linda’s family could get total ownership of all Disney assets in South Africa.   So in 2006, Disney came to an out of court settlement with Linda’s family, and they appear to have pressured Abilene Music to do the same thing. Under South African law, “Mbube” would go out of copyright by 2012, but it was agreed that Linda’s daughters would receive royalties on “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” until 2017, even after the South African copyright had expired, and they would get a lump sum from Disney. The money they were owed would be paid into a trust.   After 2017, they would still get money from “Wimoweh”, but not from “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, whose rights would revert fully to its American owners.   Unfortunately, most of the money they got seems to have gone on legal bills. The three surviving sisters each received, in total, about eighty-three thousand dollars over the ten-year course of the agreement after those bills, which is much, much, more than they were getting before, but only a fraction of what the song would have earned them if they’d been paid properly.   In 2017, the year the agreement expired, Disney announced they were making a photorealistic CGI remake of The Lion King. That, too, featured “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, and that, too, became the most successful animated film of all time. Under American copyright law, “Wimoweh” will remain in copyright until 2047, unless further changes are made to the law. Solomon Linda’s family will continue to receive royalties on that song. “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, the much more successful song, will remain in copyright until 2057, and the money from that will mostly go to Claire Weiss-Creatore, who was George Weiss’ third wife, and who after he died in 2010 became the third wife of Luigi Creatore, of Hugo and Luigi, who died himself in 2015. Solomon Linda’s daughters won’t see a penny of it.   According to George Weiss’ obituary in the Guardian, he “was a familiar figure at congressional hearings into copyright reform and music piracy, testifying as to the vital importance of intellectual property protection for composers”.  

VIRTUAL TABLE READ of COMMUNITY followed by Q&A with Variety's MIchael Schneider   Please donate to World Central Kitchen wck.org and Frontline Foods frontlinefoods.org to benefit COVID-19 relief efforts. The Darkest Timeline Podcast also donated to both organizations as well. TABLE READ CREDITS: Community Created by Dan Harmon Season 5, Episode 3 “Cooperative Polygraphy” Written by Alex Rubens JOEL McHALE “Jeff Winger”   GILLIAN JACOBS "Britta Perry" ALISON BRIE “Annie Edison”   DONALD GLOVER "Troy Barnes" YVETTE NICOLE BROWN “Shirley Bennett”     DANNY PUDI "Abed Nadir" KEN JEONG “Ben Chang” JIM RASH "Dean Pelton" PEDRO PASCAL "Mr. Stone" Theme written and performed by KEITH SLETTEDAHL TABLE READ DIRECTED BY Jim Rash EXECUTIVE PRODUCER Dan Harmon PRODUCERS Daniel Gross, Caddie Hastings EDITOR Matt Marhefka The characters and incidents portrayed and the names used in the Table Read are fictitious, and any similarity to the name, character, or history of any person is entirely coincidental and unintentional. The views and opinions expressed by the Q&A participants are their own. This program is protected under the laws of the United States and other countries, and its unauthorized duplication, distribution or exhibition may result in civil liability and criminal prosecution. Copyright © 2020 Sony Pictures Television Inc. All rights reserved. Sony Pictures Television Inc. is the author of this program for the purposes of Article 15 (2) of the Berne Convention and all national laws giving effect thereto.

In this episode, Cathay Y. N. Smith, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Montana Blewett School of Law, discusses her article "Creative Destruction: Copyright's Fair Use Doctrine and the Moral Right of Integrity," which is published in the Pepperdine Law Review. Smith begins by explaining the origins of the moral right of integrity in the Berne Convention, and its introduction into United States copyright law via the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990. She identifies a tension between the right of integrity and the right of fair use. And she explains how that tension can be resolved, depending on how a particular work is used. Smith is on Twitter at @CathaySmith.This episode was hosted by Brian L. Frye, Spears-Gilbert Associate Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky College of Law. Frye is on Twitter at @brianlfrye. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode, Rebecca Giblin, Associate Professor at Monash University Law, discusses her paper "A New Copyright Bargain: Reclaiming Lost Culture and Getting Authors Paid," which was recently published by the Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts. In her paper, Giblin expands on her previous work, including the book "What If We Could Reimagine Copyright?" Among other things, she explains why the Berne Convention and TRIPS have created the false impression that copyright policy is immutable, and shows how reform is actually possible and desirable.Keywords: Copyright, Berne, TRIPS, Authors, Libraries, Incentives, Rewards See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Host Mindy McGinnis rounds up the guests and topics for the month of June, as well as shares a little on the history of copyright in the US, the Berne Convention, and what this means for writers today.

The first ska recordings were created at facilities such as Studio One and WIRL Records in Kingston, Jamaica with producers such as Dodd, Reid, Prince Buster, and Edward Seaga The ska sound coincided with the celebratory feelings surrounding Jamaica's independence from the UK in 1962; an event commemorated by songs such as Derrick Morgan's "Forward March" and The Skatalites' "Freedom Sound". Until Jamaica ratified the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, the country didn't honor international music copyright protection. This created a large number of cover songs and reinterpretations. One such cover was Millie Small's version of the R&B/shuffle tune, "My Boy Lollypop" first recorded in New York in 1956 by 14 year old Barbie Gaye.][20] Smalls' rhythmically similar version, released in 1964, was Jamaica's first commercially successful international hit. With over seven million copies sold, it remains one of the best selling reggae/ska songs of all time. Many other Jamaican artists would have success recording instrumental ska versions of popular American and British music, such as Beatles songs, Motown and Atlantic soul hits, movie theme songs and surf rock instrumentals. The Wailers covered The Beatles' "And I Love Her", and radically reinterpreted Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone". They also created their own versions of Latin-influenced music from artists such as Mongo Santamaria

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 175. This is the fourth of six lectures of my 2011 Mises Academy course "Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics" (originally presented Tuesdays, Mar. 22-April 26, 2011). The first lecture may be found in KOL172. Transcript below. Youtube and slides for this lecture are provided below. The course and other matters are discussed in further detail at KOL172. The “suggested readings” for the entire course are provided in the notes for KOL172. Lecture 4: IP STATUTES AND TREATIES; OVERVIEW OF JUSTIFICTIONS FOR IP; PROPERTY, SCARCITY AND IDEAS; RIGHTS-BASED ARGUMENTS FOR IP: CREATION AS A SOURCE OF RIGHTS SUGGESTED READING MATERIAL See the notes for KOL172. ❧ Transcript Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics—Lecture 4: IP Statutes and Treaties; Overview of Justifications for IP; Property, Scarcity and Ideas; Rights-based Arguments for IP; Creation as a Source of Rights Stephan Kinsella Mises Academy, April 12, 2011 00:00:00 STEPHAN KINSELLA: … economics association groups, and Sheldon Richman is an anti-IP libertarian guy with the Foundation for Economic Education.  He's editor of The Freeman.  He's written some good stuff on IP as well, and he was there.  Roderick Long was there, who's also good on IP, and some other people and also this guy named Adam Mossoff who I've mentioned before I think.  He's an objectivist law professor at George Mason.  He's pro-intellectual property, and he gives this typical Randian line for it.  And Sheldon was relating to me his interaction with this guy and how the debate went.  It was quite fascinating. 00:00:37 Apparently, Mossoff really didn't like getting questions and didn't really know how to respond to a lot of questions to defend the IP view.  So I think that spurred Sheldon to pose this morning a question for Randian IP advocates.  It's already got a lot of comments on the thread.  Check it out.  He basically said I want to ask the Randians if you believe that their property rights come from getting property in things that you value, which is their theory, which we'll go into later today or next class. 00:01:15 Imagine a simple society where there's a tribe and there's one guy who explores – does a lot of investigation trying to figure out the best kind of fruit to eat, and he discovers that there's a lot of berries around and people eat them.  Sometimes they do better.  Sometimes they get sick.  And he discovered there's one berry that is really good, healthy, and nourishing, and he also discovers there's a few that you should not eat. 00:01:42 And according to the Randian theory, it would seem like he has an intellectual property right in that knowledge, in that technique.  And so the question is do the other people in the village who have observed what he's doing and they see which berries he's eating and not eating now, do they have the right to eat the berries they want to eat and not eat they berries they want to eat?  Or do they have to get his permission first?  So he asked them this question as sort of a test of their theory, and of course the answer is, according to their theory, he would not be able – these people need his permission, which is, of course, absurd, which is the point of the hypo, to make them uncomfortable.  I don't expect any serious Randians that would attempt to address it, but it's interesting. 00:02:23 I had a post this week on Mises, and C4SIF, “Let's Make Copyright Opt-OUT.”  I think I mentioned this already to the class before that copyright would be better if it was opt-in, which means you don't get a copyright unless you apply for it, register for it, which used to be the law in the US until '89, 1989.  But when we joined the Berne Convention, we got rid of formalities, so it's automatic now.  And it would be better if we could get rid of that because it would solve this so-called orphan works problem.

In The Struggle for Canadian Copyright: Imperialism to Internationalism, 1842-1971, Sara Bannerman narrates the complex story of Canada’s copyright policy since the mid-19th century. The book details the country’s halting attempts to craft a copyright regime responsive both to its position as a net importer of published work and to its peculiar political geography as a British dominion bordering the United States. Bannerman charts Canada’s early, largely unsuccessful effort to craft a less restrictive policy in the run up to, and aftermath of, the 1886 Berne Convention-the multilateral agreement that established the enduring framework for the international copyright system. The main obstacle, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, was Britain’s insistence on a uniform and Berne-friendly policy throughout the empire. Even as those imperial constraints fell away over the first half of the 20th century, Canada increasingly aligned with powerful net exporters like France and Britain–in large part, Bannerman shows, to strengthen the country’s image as a model international citizen. The Struggle for Canadian Copyright is a story of constraint–the country’s copyright independence was never won–but Bannerman’s account also highlights the historical contingency of the restrictive norms that dominate international IP policy. A companion website includes archival documents and other materials. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Struggle for Canadian Copyright: Imperialism to Internationalism, 1842-1971, Sara Bannerman narrates the complex story of Canada’s copyright policy since the mid-19th century. The book details the country’s halting attempts to craft a copyright regime responsive both to its position as a net importer of published work and to its peculiar political geography as a British dominion bordering the United States. Bannerman charts Canada’s early, largely unsuccessful effort to craft a less restrictive policy in the run up to, and aftermath of, the 1886 Berne Convention-the multilateral agreement that established the enduring framework for the international copyright system. The main obstacle, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, was Britain’s insistence on a uniform and Berne-friendly policy throughout the empire. Even as those imperial constraints fell away over the first half of the 20th century, Canada increasingly aligned with powerful net exporters like France and Britain–in large part, Bannerman shows, to strengthen the country’s image as a model international citizen. The Struggle for Canadian Copyright is a story of constraint–the country’s copyright independence was never won–but Bannerman’s account also highlights the historical contingency of the restrictive norms that dominate international IP policy. A companion website includes archival documents and other materials. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Struggle for Canadian Copyright: Imperialism to Internationalism, 1842-1971, Sara Bannerman narrates the complex story of Canada’s copyright policy since the mid-19th century. The book details the country’s halting attempts to craft a copyright regime responsive both to its position as a net importer of published work and to its peculiar political geography as a British dominion bordering the United States. Bannerman charts Canada’s early, largely unsuccessful effort to craft a less restrictive policy in the run up to, and aftermath of, the 1886 Berne Convention-the multilateral agreement that established the enduring framework for the international copyright system. The main obstacle, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, was Britain’s insistence on a uniform and Berne-friendly policy throughout the empire. Even as those imperial constraints fell away over the first half of the 20th century, Canada increasingly aligned with powerful net exporters like France and Britain–in large part, Bannerman shows, to strengthen the country’s image as a model international citizen. The Struggle for Canadian Copyright is a story of constraint–the country’s copyright independence was never won–but Bannerman’s account also highlights the historical contingency of the restrictive norms that dominate international IP policy. A companion website includes archival documents and other materials. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Struggle for Canadian Copyright: Imperialism to Internationalism, 1842-1971, Sara Bannerman narrates the complex story of Canada’s copyright policy since the mid-19th century. The book details the country’s halting attempts to craft a copyright regime responsive both to its position as a net importer of published work and to its peculiar political geography as a British dominion bordering the United States. Bannerman charts Canada’s early, largely unsuccessful effort to craft a less restrictive policy in the run up to, and aftermath of, the 1886 Berne Convention-the multilateral agreement that established the enduring framework for the international copyright system. The main obstacle, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, was Britain’s insistence on a uniform and Berne-friendly policy throughout the empire. Even as those imperial constraints fell away over the first half of the 20th century, Canada increasingly aligned with powerful net exporters like France and Britain–in large part, Bannerman shows, to strengthen the country’s image as a model international citizen. The Struggle for Canadian Copyright is a story of constraint–the country’s copyright independence was never won–but Bannerman’s account also highlights the historical contingency of the restrictive norms that dominate international IP policy. A companion website includes archival documents and other materials. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Struggle for Canadian Copyright: Imperialism to Internationalism, 1842-1971, Sara Bannerman narrates the complex story of Canada’s copyright policy since the mid-19th century. The book details the country’s halting attempts to craft a copyright regime responsive both to its position as a net importer of published work and to its peculiar political geography as a British dominion bordering the United States. Bannerman charts Canada’s early, largely unsuccessful effort to craft a less restrictive policy in the run up to, and aftermath of, the 1886 Berne Convention-the multilateral agreement that established the enduring framework for the international copyright system. The main obstacle, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, was Britain’s insistence on a uniform and Berne-friendly policy throughout the empire. Even as those imperial constraints fell away over the first half of the 20th century, Canada increasingly aligned with powerful net exporters like France and Britain–in large part, Bannerman shows, to strengthen the country’s image as a model international citizen. The Struggle for Canadian Copyright is a story of constraint–the country’s copyright independence was never won–but Bannerman’s account also highlights the historical contingency of the restrictive norms that dominate international IP policy. A companion website includes archival documents and other materials. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Karen and Bradley listen to and discuss Gabriel Holloway's talk from FOSDEM 2013, entitled FOSS code goes in and never comes out: The Challenge of Sandboxed Proprietary Cloud Services. Show Notes: Segment 0 (00:00:33) Karen and Bradley introduce the talk. Segment 1 (00:05:48) The speaker's that you hear are: Gabriel Holloway, who gives the talk Till Jaeger asks the first question. A few other questions are asked, but we're unsure who the speakers are. Tom Marble, asks a question later. Unfortunately, Gabe didn't provide us with slides. Segment 2 (00:52:25) Bradley mentioned the Berne Convention on Copyright. (01:07:19) Karen mentioned Cooper Union and how they are in danger of running out of money for their full tuition scholarships. (01:10:00) Bradley looked but couldn't find the NPR story about terms of use. (01:19:37) Send feedback and comments on the cast to . You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on identi.ca and and Twitter. Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums. The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Karen and Bradley listen to and discuss Gabriel Holloway's talk from FOSDEM 2013, entitled FOSS code goes in and never comes out: The Challenge of Sandboxed Proprietary Cloud Services. Show Notes: Segment 0 (00:00:33) Karen and Bradley introduce the talk. Segment 1 (00:05:48) The speaker's that you hear are: Gabriel Holloway, who gives the talk Till Jaeger asks the first question. A few other questions are asked, but we're unsure who the speakers are. Tom Marble, asks a question later. Unfortunately, Gabe didn't provide us with slides. Segment 2 (00:52:25) Bradley mentioned the Berne Convention on Copyright. (01:07:19) Karen mentioned Cooper Union and how they are in danger of running out of money for their full tuition scholarships. (01:10:00) Bradley looked but couldn't find the NPR story about terms of use. (01:19:37) Send feedback and comments on the cast to . You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on on Twitter and and FaiF on Twitter. Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums. The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Sunday, March 1, 2009. Twenty years ago today, the provisions of the Berne Convention came into effect in the United States.  I talk about the Berne Convention, copyright law (from the point of view of an interested layperson, not a lawyer) and share a story about how Joe and I got caught up in the complexities of copyright, about a decade ago.