The success of Wikileaks in obtaining and releasing information has inspired mainstream media outlets to develop proprietary copycat sites. Al-Jazeera got into the act first, launching the Al-Jazeera Transparency Unit (AJTU), an initiative meant to "allow Al-Jazeera's supporters to shine light on notable and noteworthy government and corporate activities...

The below originally appeared in the Daily Journal.
The past year has seen the emergence of a new litigation strategy that poses particular challenges for the federal courts: mass copyright litigation. Over 130 mass copyright cases – i.e., copyright infringement cases joining together hundreds and often thousands of...

Nevada federal judge Roger Hunt was busy last week. In addition to his widely reported decision in Righthaven v. Democratic Underground to unseal Righthaven LLC’s business agreement with publisher Stephen Media – an agreement that shows Righthaven's claim of copyright ownership is a sham – Judge Hunt also ...

The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. heard oral argument yesterday in the closely watched “breast cancer gene” patent case. At issue are two patents covering naturally occurring human genes that, when present, signal an increased likelihood of developing breast cancer. The ACLU and the ...

Today the Supreme Court agreed to hear an important case about whether Congress has the power to "restore" copyright protection to works that already exist in the public domain. To be clear, for more than 200 years the law has been settled – once a work was in the public...

“COICA”, Senator Leahy’s Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act, is back. The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on "Targeting Websites Dedicated To Stealing American Intellectual Property" tomorrow morning.
As a reminder, COICA would give the government dramatic new copyright enforcement powers,...

Last year, Ninth Circuit Chief Judge Alex Kozinski and Josh Goldfoot from the DoJ's Criminal Division directly confronted some of EFF's concerns about overreaching theories of secondary copyright infringement. Playing on EFF founder John Perry Barlow's seminal essay, Judge Kozinski and Mr. Goldfoot titled their work "A Declaration of...

After a down-to-the-wire push, the Federal Communications Commission this week approved by 3-2 its long-awaited regulatory proposal on net neutrality. We haven’t finished combing through the actual rules document, all 200 pages of which were just released today, but nonetheless the summary documents gave us some important hints about...

Viacom’s appeal of the district court’s decision in Viacom v. YouTube is well underway, and now the amicus briefs supporting Viacom have been filed as well. The arguments in Viacom’s opening brief largely rehash many of the same arguments Viacom made—unsuccessfully—the first time around: Generalized awareness of...

The Ninth Circuit today issued its decision in the second of a trio of cases that raise the critical legal question of whether "magic words" in a end-user license agreement (EULA) slapped onto a consumer product can turn buyers (or gift recipients) into mere licensees, rather than owners. Following...