Reaction videos, reggaetón riddims, nine-year-old tweets, and a poet’s second loss to Taylor Swift. The courts spent the run-up to summer clearing their dockets. Here’s what piled up.
Welcome to a special edition of What’s Up With Copyright Lately, where I returned from vacation to find that the federal courts didn’t take one. I pulled…
Four major music companies bought into a disputed copyright, hired a Supreme Court heavyweight, and filed a cert petition arguing that the Fifth Circuit sent U.S. termination rights on an unauthorized world tour. Now comes the hard part: getting four Justices to order another round.
Cyril Vetter’s own lawyers saw this coming. Weeks before the…
The Ninth Circuit granted en banc rehearing in Sedlik v. Von Drachenberg, vacating the panel opinion and putting “total concept and feel” on the chopping block.
Back in January, I wrote that the concurrences in Sedlik v. Von Drachenberg, the long-running photography-meets-tattoo copyright case, read like “a roadmap for en banc review—and an unmistakable…
Tentative reactions to a tentative ruling: court’s draft order would hand Twitch streamer Denims a fair use win in Ethan Klein’s reaction-video lawsuit, but the analysis it skipped could matter later.
There’s a tentative ruling out in Ted Entertainment v. Saber, and if it sticks, Ethan Klein will lose a fair use fight on the…
Dismissals, dueling summary-judgment briefs, and the first post-Cox AI rulings show how fast Cox v. Sony Music is reshaping copyright litigation—and where the next fight is heading.
Copyright doctrine usually doesn’t move this quickly. On March 25, the Supreme Court handed down Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment, and the copyright world has been…
A year after Klein sued three Twitch streamers over their Content Nuke reactions, only Denims is still fighting—and her motion for judgment on the pleadings raises a fair use question no reaction video case has squarely addressed.
One minute after YouTuber Ethan Klein dropped Content Nuke: Hasan Piker—his 102-minute “tragi-comic documentary” accusing the Twitch…
A replacement opinion affirms Netflix’s fair use of a one-minute funeral clip—and gives documentary filmmakers the post-Warhol roadmap they’ve been waiting for.
The Tiger King hype lasted about six weeks. The lawsuits have been copyright’s version of long COVID. But after nearly six years of litigation, two rounds of oral arguments, and one vacated opinion,…
The Supreme Court’s newest copyright decision is already being used to argue that an AI video generator trained on major studio content should be treated the same as an internet service provider.
Three weeks ago, the Supreme Court decided a case about an internet service provider that refused to disconnect subscribers who pirated music using…
The Supreme Court just killed “knowledge plus material contribution” as a basis for contributory liability, rewriting the rules for secondary copyright infringement. AI defendants are already taking notes.
The facts in Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment (read opinion here) were about as bad as it gets for a secondary-liability defendant. Sony and other…
A stock photo company sued for copyright infringement over a single image of raw pork chops, took the case all the way to trial, won $200, then asked for $69,000 in attorney’s fees. It went poorly.
Prepared Food Photos, Inc. is a stock food photo archive and veritable copyright litigation factory that has turned suing…
