There are two constants in the law world: copyright, and publicity. In this blog we will discuss these subjects and better understand what is it that they really do. What do they protect in the entertainment business?
First of all, copyright is nothing more than a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive right to it, usually for a limited time. Copyright also gives the copyright holder the right to credited for the work, to determine who may adapt the work to other forms, who may perform the work, who may financially benefit from it, etc. It’s an intellectual property form applicable to any expressible form of an idea or information that is substantive and discrete.
Copyright protects everything that is properly registered and complies with the requisites it needs to be determined copyright-protected. Such as works of art, scripts, manuscripts, music, songs, compositions, recipes drafted in a specific way, websites, titles, names, architectural projects, etcetera.
And that’s what Mr. Firemark discusses in this episode of “Entertainment Law Update” podcast. More specifically he discusses the case of Right Haven, a “copyright troll” as Mr. Firemark calls it has been filing hundreds of suits against bloggers and sorts, who’ve been republishing bits and pieces an even entire articles from newspapers. He tells us that the “Las Vegas Review Journal” has been suffering three losses in one week. He continues explaining that a “copyright troll is a company that goes around acquiring rights in copyrighted material, so that they can go sue people and they often exact little settlements from those people”. According to Mr. Firemark settling is always cheaper than litigating. He proceeds to tell us that these little companies have been fighting and succeeding with pre-trial motions for dismissals. The suit was brought about on August 10th for a five-sentence excerpt of a Las Vegas Review-Journal news story that a user posted on the forum, with a link back to the Review–Journal website. Righthaven claims damages of up to $150,000 under the Copyright Act’s statutory damages provisions, seeks the target’s domain name and uses these threats to attempt to push defendants into a quick settlement. Democratic Underground, on the other hand, asked the court to affirm that the excerpt of the article does not infringe copyright and is a fair use of the material, with no damages due to Righthaven.*
The question on our minds is: Do you think there was a clear violation of copyright in this case? The way I see it, the user always gave credit to the original poster (Las Vegas Review-Journal). So, I don’t think that he violated any rules or laws.
*According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (Democratic Underground's representation), on June 14, 2011, the Nevada federal court dismissed Righthaven's copyright claim, finding that the company did not own the copyright. The case for a declaration of non-infringement proceeds against Stephens Media.
“Monkeying Around with Copyright Law” Episode 23 by GordonFiremark, Entertainment Law Update Podcast
Defamation, which can also be called calumny, vilification, traducement, slander, and libel, is the communication of a statement that makes a claim, expressly stated or implied to be factual, that may give an individual business, product, group, government, or nation a negative image. The only requirement: that the claim be false and that the publication is communicated to someone other than the person defamed (the claimant).
Mr. Firemark has a special guest on this episode that has special experience with defamation, Mr. Adrianos Facchetti from the California Defamation Law Blog. The first case that they discuss starts by saying that a court in New Jersey ruled that a blogger is not a journalist. With which brings us to the next case about a blogger from the state of Washington who was writing in her blog about a specific business, and this business sued her for defamation in New Jersey. And the court, ruled that she is not a journalist, so therefore she would not get the protection from the state’s Shield law. The court said that in order for her to be covered by the Shield law, she would have to be affiliated with a major media outlet. One thing that Mr. Facchetti goes on to say, I found very interesting is that the message boards that we experience now a days can be more damaging than the old Ben Franklin’s printing press. Granted, journalism should never be about expressing an opinion, but an unadulterated fact. The truth of the matter is that now a day we have multiple ways of communicating with others. Whether its fact or opinion? It all depends on the receiving end of that message. This is why the First Amendment is so tricky when it comes to journalism and then co-related to defamation.
What are your thoughts?
Publicity is the deliberate attempt to manage the public’s perception of a subject. No one knows better than us, that the best examples for subjects of publicity are artists and politicians. Mr. Firemark tells us that the new Google-branded smart phone called the Nexus 1. Apparently the term Nexus 6 was used in a novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" penned by author Philip K. Dick, which is also the book on which the film "Blade Runner" was based on. The androids on that movie were called the Nexus 6. Mr. Dick's daughter said that this "brand" was in violation of our intellectual property, claiming trademark violations. There's obviously a conflict here, because it's a play on words, I see what she means, but at the same time, I can't say that she has a point, because droids are under trademark with LucasFilm. so, it's interesting to see the conflict between the two, but how do you separate one from the other. We know that Nexus means a connection; androids means a robot possessing human features.
My question about this is: how do we separate the terms from these three parties? These are obviously different "entities", we know in some aspect, we're not talking about the same thing. But how does publicity in law cover this? How is it "unglued" from each other?
It's truly an interesting discussion. But I want to know what you guys think... Looking forward to your comments down below!
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