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Due to the level of interest in Garcia v. Google, the Ninth Circuit has a dedicated page providing information and key court documents to the public.

I have listed the Amicus briefs along with very cursory descriptions below. The briefs are all quite short.

Internet Law Professors — addressing the implications of the Court’s decision for Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.  Section 230 is vital to the health of e-commerce and web 2.0 businesses, it provides the legal foundation for many of the most popular websites that enable users to communicate with each other or the world at large.  The panel’s broad interpretation of copyright law undermines Section 230 immunity without even expressly considering it. * I am one of the Amici for this brief.

Professors of Intellectual Property Law — arguing that the Court’s opinion misinterprets the baseline requirements for copyrightability. ** This is the brief to read for students of copyright law.

Adobe Systems, et al. It is not surprising that eBay, Facebook, Gawker, Kickstarter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, and Yahoo!  would feel strongly about this case. These amici argue that the Court’s decision and order places too much responsibility on service providers to monitor their services and denies the public’s interest in free expression and access to information. They also argue that the Court’s order is unworkable and that the ruling poses a serious threat to online service providers’ businesses.

Netflix, Inc. — arguing that that the ruling creates a new species of copyright and risks wreaking havoc with established copyright and business rules on which third party distributors, such as Netflix, depend.

International Documentary Ass’n — arguing that the Court’s opinion has created uncertainty as to several fundamental concepts that are essential to modern filmmaking.

Floor64 (publisher of Techdirt.com) & Organization for Transformative Works —arguing that the Court’s decision undermines Congress’s goal of fostering online speech by effectively stripping intermediaries of the statutory protection they depend on to deliver it — i.e. the safe harbors created by the § 230 of the Communications Decency Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 512).)

California Broadcasters — arguing that a finding that individual performances within films and television programs may be entitled to copyright protection creates uncertainly for entertainment media creators and distributors.

News Organizations — arguing that the Court’s decision did not properly consider important First Amendment interests and that it poses serious risk to news organizations that extend far beyond the unique facts of the case at hand.

Electronic Frontier Foundation, et al. — framing the issues in Constitutional terms and addressing the standard for preliminary injunctions.

Public Citizen Litigation Group — focusing on the correct standard for issuing an injunction restraining speech.

This amicus brief was written by David Post and James Grimmelmann on behalf of 36 law professors in the pending case of ABC v Aereo, now before the Supreme Court (oral argument set for April 22, 2014).

Let me know if this post came up in your rss feed.

A preview of the data.

For more details see Copyright Trolling, An Empirical Study (this is still the version posted last week, a new version with additional data will be out soon).

The fourth annual work-in-progress symposium for internet law scholarship  will be held at the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School on Saturday March 8, 2014 at .

The work-in-progress event was created for internet law scholars to receive feedback about their papers and projects from their academic peers.  This year some of the nation’s  leading internet law academics will convened at New York Law School to present serious papers under the following whimsical headings:

• Panel 1: Copyright, The Gift That Keeps On Giving
• Panel 2: Tinfoil Hats Are Only One Solution
• Panel 3: Paranoia
• Panel 4: It’s All Good
• Panel 5: It’s Private
• Panel 6: This Internet Thing Is Going To Be Huge
• Panel 7: Because Too Much IP is Never Enough
• Panel 8: The One, True Cyberlaw

Dan Hunter (Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law, New York Law School and Professor of Intellectual Property and Innovation, QUT Law School, Australia) deserves all credit/blame for the above.

I will be speaking about the ongoing  Aereo litigation tomorrow at the Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property’s Annual Symposium.

On April 22nd the Supreme Court will hear arguments as to whether a company “publicly performs” a copyrighted television program when it retransmits a broadcast of that program to thousands of paid subscribers over the Internet. My view is that this case should not be about public performance. The court in Cablevision got that one right, no other reading of the Copyright Act makes sense.

The Supreme Court should hold that a single aerial (or N aerials) that copy and transmit at an N:N ratio is not 1 performance to N people, it is N performances to N people and thus not “public”.

This does not mean Aereo is off the hook. Cablevision’s device is consistent with the Supreme Court’s Sony Betamax decision from 1984: copying made possible by a remote-dvr is  fair use. However, to the extent the Aereo system is designed to offer what is, in effect, live or almost live ‘rebroadcast’ beyond the authorized reception range of the original broadcast it may not be fair use. This is an open question, but the Supreme Court can’t decide it because it has not been briefed on the issue.

Whether a company “publicly performs” a copyrighted television program when it retransmits a broadcast is not the right question. Critics of Cablevision seem to think that if there is no public performance right for an R-DVR, then there is no tolling point at which creators get paid. But avoiding public performance does not avoid the initial broadcast or copying.

I have some slides that go into this in a bit more detail. Comments welcome.

Jason Schultz, Brian Love, Jim Bessen and Mike Meurer have put together an excellent “Brief of Amici Curiae Law, Business, and Economics Scholars” in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank, a case about to be argued before the US Supreme Court.

I signed this brief because I believe that the experience of the last 20 years shows that extending patent protection to abstract ideas and software functions does far more to impede innovation than it does to encourage it.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has expanded the scope of patentable subject matter for abstract ideas over the last 20 years (see, In re Alappat, 33 F.3d 1526 (Fed. Cir. 1994) and State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, Inc., 149 F.3d 1368 (Fed. Cir. 1998)). This expansion has lead to an explosion of software patenting and software patent litigation. Abstract patent claims award rights beyond the scope of actual invention, their boundaries are unclear, they don’t provide notice to third parties  and, for all these reasons, they invite opportunistic litigation.

(See U.S. Gov’t Accountability Office, GAO-13-465, Intellectual Property: Assessing Factors That Affect Patent Infringement Litigation Could Help Improve Patent Quality 13 (2013), available at http://1.usa.gov/1gatCRr)

The Supreme Court granted cert in this case to decide “Whether claims to computer-implemented inventions—including claims to systems and machines, processes, and items of manufacture—are directed to patent-eligible subject matter within the meaning of 35 U.S.C. § 101.” I expect the court to rule computer software is patent eligible, but that patent examiners should reject over-broad software patent claims on the basis of lack of patentable subject matter. As the divisions in the Federal Circuit’s en band decision show, it won’t be easy to develop a standard to determine whether a computer-implemented invention is a patent-ineligible, abstract idea.

The Brief Amicus Curiae Of Intellectual Property Scholars in Dish Network L.L.C., v. American Broadcasting Companies, Inc., Et. Al has just been filed. The case is on appeal from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Shubha Ghosh (U. Wisconsin Law School) wrote the brief and several IP academics signed it because we are concerned that

“ABC’s interpretation of copyright law would undermine longstanding fair use precedent. We urge the Court to reject ABC’s attempt to render Sony obsolete and re-litigate the public’s interest in making fair use copies with the aid of time-shifting technology.”

This case is  significant because it will affect the future of private noncommercial time-shifting of television programs – a fair use right expressly recognized by the Supreme Court in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984). Our view, expressed in the brief is that the

“advancement of technology from the videotape recorder (“VTR”) to the videocassette recorder (“VCR”) considered in Sony, to today’s digital video recorder (“DVR”) and the technological enhancements of the DVR has not – nor should it – affect the scope of protection expressly recognized in Sony.”

Download the brief here: Paginated Brief Amicus Curiae of Intellectual Property Scholars filed 1_29_14 [D155]