Oct

26

Copyright Infringement: Worse Than Murder?

October 26, 2009 | 1 Comment

I am a criminal. I have years of experience with a certain criminal activity. I started in high school on advice from a friend, and pretty soon I found a group of similarly-inclined friends to roll with and we ratcheted up our involvement some more. I learned new techniques in college and avoided the crackdowns [...]

Oct

25

Google: Changing Laws Around the World

October 25, 2009 | Leave a Comment

As both sides of the Google books controversy try to work on a revised settlement before the new November 9th deadline, the effects continue to ripple across the globe: on Monday, the European Commission announced plans to work on revising copyright law in the EU. Citing the need to compete on the digital frontier, Commissioner [...]

Apr

6

Suing Google: Don’t Judge an E-book by its Publisher

April 6, 2009 | Leave a Comment

The W&M chapter of ACS recently co-sponsored an event with the Student Intellectual Property Society with attorney Joanne Zack, a founder of Boni & Zack LLC, who was plaintiff’s counsel in the recently settled Authors Guild v. Google (PDF). The case involved a lawsuit against Google Books for making a searchable database of books [...]

Oct

8

Copyright Czar to Wage War on Pirates

October 8, 2008 | 5 Comments

When I first read about legislation proposing a “copyright czar” (PDF), my first thought was: why are we using ancient monarchical terms to describe a man in our democratic federal government?  The copyright czar will, of course, have to be a man, because the word “czar” is gendered - as far as I can tell [...]