The most active group of movie producers in the realm of litigating apparent copyright infringement in 2011 seems to be producers of pornographic material. I have no hard evidence that this is the case, but from the sheer amount of cases I hear about, including some demand letters that clients have brought to my attention, […]
Category: Intellectual Property
Download a copyrighted movie using the popular downloader BitTorrent? That action is considered copyright infringement. Movie studios are becoming increasingly active in protecting their copyrights, requesting courts to approve their subpoenas on internet service providers to find out the personal private information about people who are supposedly tied to IP addresses of infringers. Movie studios […]
2011 has been a year of very large copyright infringement complaint filings. First came word that the makers of The Expendables are suing 23,322 John Does who allegedly downloaded the movie online for free using a program called BitTorrent. Roughly a week later, a new lawsuit against 24,583 John Does who allegedly illegally downloaded the movie […]
Zediva does not have name recognition among the general public yet, but it certainly has plans to enter every American household. Movie studios will do everything in their power to prevent that from happening. On April 4, 2011, multiple movie studios filed a complaint for copyright infringement in the United States District Court Central District […]
Last week, I wrote about a lawsuit filed by the United States Copyright Group (USCG) on behalf of Nu Image regarding the supposed illegal downloading of Nu Image’s The Expendables movie. At the time, the lawsuit was the largest file-sharing copyright infringement lawsuit based on the number of defendants (23,322). That record did not last […]
Yesterday, I wrote about the largest file-sharing copyright infringement lawsuit based on the number of defendants (23,322), which was recently filed. The subject of the matter is the illegal downloading of the 2010 movie, The Expendables. While the studio that released the movie will probably be happy based on the sheer number of small settlement offers […]
On IMDb, The Expendibles has a rating of 6.7 out of 10, based on over 79,000 people rating the movie. It is certainly not one of the more popular movies to be released in 2010, but that does not mean that nobody watched it. In fact, a lot of people viewed the movie after its […]
This past week, I was published in the NYU School of Law IP and Entertainment Law Ledger. The piece, titled, “You May Not ‘Like’ This Title: Everything Stored On Facebook Is Discoverable,” takes a look at how Facebook’s content may be used as evidence in a lawsuit. Content that we publish on our Walls and […]
Reverse Domain Name Hijacking (RDNH), also known as reverse cybersquatting, is similar to trademark bullying. Both tactics involve the trademark owner using his trademark rights to unjustly interfere with another’s rights. With trademark bullying, a trademark owner uses his trademark rights to harass and intimidate another beyond what the law might be reasonably interpreted to […]
Authors and scholars would love to be able to use unpublished works in their own works, but they must do so carefully so that they do not run afoul of copyright law and publisher restrictions. Historically, it has been tough to prove a fair use when dealing with unpublished works. There is no per se […]