Category: Uncategorized

After teaching copyright law based on my own materials for several years now I have decided to release my reading materials under a creative commons license. You can find these materials on my website at https://matthewsag.com/eroc/.

These Extended Readings on Copyright can be used as a textbook or as individual modules to supplement a textbook. Unlike a regular textbook, I don’t pretend that every important issue in copyright is addressed in these materials. The modules are arranged in the order that I teach them, but most can be used in any sequence. You should consider the current offering as a Beta version. I will post additional modules and revise the existing ones on a continual basis, major revisions will be noted on this website.

Chicago LegalTech & Innovation 11-1-2018

Tonja Jacobi and I will be presenting to the #LegalTech & Innovation Talks at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law this afternoon. We are going to talk about ScotusOA and how we use text mining to predict the outcomes of Supreme court cases.

Matthew Sag, TDM (Global Congress September 2018)

Posted here mostly because my usb stick is not working.

I presented my working paper on the legal infrastructure for text data mining at IPSC yesterday and I promised to post my slides. Here it is: Public, Matthew Sag, Legal Infrastructure for TDM (IPSC August 2018). I won’t be posting a draft online for a while because I want to get more feedback from people actually working in this area. But if you would like an advanced draft, please email me.

I have not posted here in a long time, but I am still alive. Partly I have been busy some long term projects and some things that don’t fit the copyright and tech focus of this website. My work on the copyright implications of text data mining has lead to a series of projects actually doing text data mining. This has been fun and has lead to new insights about the copyright issues that have dominated a lot of work for the last decade.

Check out my new website devoted to empirical analysis of Supreme Court oral arguments: ScotusOA.com.

I made an annotated version of Section 512 of the Copyright Act — the DMCA Internet Safe Harbors — for my Copyright Law class and I thought that others might find it useful. My thanks to Annemarie Bridy (University of Idaho College of Law) for her helpful suggestions and additions.

Please note that this document an aid to understanding the DMCA safe harbors, it is not comprehensive, nor is it guaranteed to be free from error. Draft date: April 26, 2017.

Download link: The DMCA Safe Harbors With Brief Annotations of Important Cases

Defense Against the Dark Arts of Copyright Trolling

Jake Haskell and I have accepted an offer of publication at the Iowa Law Review. Iowa published my empirical study of copyright trolling in 2015, so it seems right to place a follow up piece there as well.

Defense Against the Dark Arts of Copyright Trolling is available now on ssrn (http://ssrn.com/abstract=2933200)

This will be my 4th publication in Iowa since 2015, the others being:

• IP Litigation in US District Courts: 1994 to 2014, 101 IOWA LAW REVIEW 1065–1112 (2016)
• Promoting Innovation, 100 IOWA LAW REVIEW 2223–2247 (2015) (with Spencer Weber Waller)
• Copyright Trolling, An Empirical Study, 100 IOWA LAW REVIEW 1105-1146 (2015)

My brief response to some comments at IPSC today re software functionality and expression.

Writing software obviously involves considerable human ingenuity, however, no one buys software to appreciate the expressive attributes of its source code. The difference between software and other forms of written communication can be demonstrated by asking the question, “what makes it good?”

For most works of authorship, there really is no consensus. However, computer scientists and software engineers will inevitably respond that good code is simple, readable, efficient, and well structured. No one says that software should be expressive, moving, that it should speak to the human condition or have emotional resonance. Software is primarily functional and good software is good because it functions well and does things that people want done.

I downloaded a selection of the longford comments re DMCA Section 512 and ran some basic word searches to try and organize the material. It would be great to someone do this on a more systematic basis! Even better if they tried some topic modeling.

At the end of the day, I am going to have to read most of these, but I am glad I don’t have to read them all!

Comments and key words (2) in Excel.