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Category: Fair use

Fox might report, but they won’t let us decide

27 October, 200719 November, 2010
| No Comments
| advertising, Copyright, Fair use, Media and Communications

Fox News logo, via their site.Over on Lex Ferenda, Daithí has highlighted that, in the US, Fox News has written to US Republican Presidential candidate John McCain asking him to stop using a clip of his own words from a debate in a political advertisement. In fact, not content with taking on one presidential candidate, Daithí points out that they have decided to take on all of them, writing to them all in similar terms.

Fox are playing a dangerous game here (well, dangerous for them, at any rate). There is a very strong argument that First Amendment political speech concerns make this advertisment a non-commercial fair use (don’t just take my word for it; Michael Geist thought so too during a similar Canadian flap last January). And an express Federal Circuit Court holding to that effect would certainly set the cat amongst the pigeons for those broadcasters like Fox who continue to insist on restricting copyright in political debates which they host / broadcast. In fact, Fox seem to be the main holdout against Lessig‘s petition to the US political parties and broadcast networks to license Presidential debates freely after they are initially broadcast – either by putting the debates into the public domain, or by permitting anyone to use or remix the contents of those debates, for any reason whatsoever, so long as there is attribution back to any purported copyright holder.…

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Speech just wants to be free – II

11 May, 200719 November, 2010
| 6 Comments
| Blogging, Copyright, Election 2007, Fair use

picture-1.pngRTÉ were quick off the mark. Further to my letter to the Director General yesterday, mentioned in my previous post, RTÉ rang the Law School in Trinity where I work, to explain to me that all the Prime Time programmes are available on the RTÉ website and that this should answer my enquiry.

I should say at once that I think that it is a splendid website, especially since its recent revamp. Moreover, I am impressed with the amout of material that they make available online. However, I don’t think that this is a full answer. My concern is not so much with availability as with lawful sharing and reuse. …

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Fair Use, again – briefly

20 April, 200719 November, 2010
| 4 Comments
| Copyright, Fair use

'Scales of Justice', a public domain IP image, via wikipediaI have on this blog called for a thoroughgoing re-examination of the current balance between reward and innovation in copyright law by the enactment of a broad legislative right of fair use. Via What if . . . and Copyright on madisonian.net (Mike Madison) and What Ifs? Copyright Law III on 43(B)log (Rebecca Tushnet, personal site; Georgetown site), I learn that Abraham Drassinower, of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, in a paper entitled “What if copyright were really about authors?” at the What If, and Other Alternative Intellectual Property and Cyberlaw Stories IP Symposium argued:

If authorship were central, copyright would be less extensive. There would be no grounds for liability for copying for personal use, and the defense of fair dealing/fair use would not be a mere exception. It would be a user right.

Great stuff, this! (At the link above, Mike Madison explored similar territory). It bears repeating: in my view, fair use ought to be a right, and not merely an exception, exemption, license, or privilege.…

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Fair Use – Recalibrating the balance in Fair Dealing

27 March, 20073 June, 2017
| 17 Comments
| Copyright, Fair use, Irish Law, James Joyce, Politics

'Scales of Justice', a public domain IP image, via wikipediaThis is a call to arms; or at least, a call for legislation which would radically recast EU copyright law.

Intellectual property law and policy are all about innovation, both encouraging it and protecting its fruits. But these are potentially opposing, perhaps even incompatible, goals: if we reward one innovator with a monopoly over the fruits of the innovation, prohibiting others’ use of those fruits, then we risk preventing the next round of innovation. The challenge to law-makers is to strike the an appropriate balance between reward and innovation, by pitching the length of the monopoly at the right level, both in the breadth of its coverage and the length of its term, beyond which others might also use it.

The story of copyright provides a good example of this dilemma. …

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Flying question for copyright lawyers

16 February, 200719 November, 2010
| 2 Comments
| Cinema, television and theatre, Copyright, Fair use

Gigsoc logoThis week’s newspapers bring us yet another Disney movie scenario of ‘plucky little community group’ being faced down by ‘horrible international conglomerate’. But this time, there is no happy ending for the little group; and the conglomerate are Disney themselves. As Ruadhán Mac Cormaic reports on the front page of Wednesday’s Irish Times (picked up by eircom.net, grand gesture, gcn.ie, queerty.com, mickeynews.com and thedisneyblog.com):

With only two days to go before its opening night, a play to be staged by a gay and lesbian students’ society at NUI Galway had to be pulled yesterday after organisers received notice from entertainment conglomerate Disney threatening legal action if the production went ahead.

It seems that the play was “loosely adapted” from the Disney film Sister Act, and that that Disney took the view that the production “would breach its intellectual property rights”. Presumably, this means that it would, in particular, infringe their copyright in the movie. My flying question is whether that is actually so? …

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Google Books in the New Yorker

31 January, 200723 November, 2010
| 6 Comments
| Copyright, Fair use, Libraries

I learn from Michael Geist’s blog that in the New Yorker this week, Jeffrey Toobin has an excellent piece on the Google Books project and the litigation it has spawned. It is well informed, and balanced, both qualities which have been sadly lacking on all sides of the debates about the project. Of his several good points, three stand out; though one of them might not be true on this side of the Atlantic.…

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Hi there! Thanks for dropping by. I’m Eoin O’Dell, and this is my blog: Cearta.ie – the Irish for rights.


“Cearta” really is the Irish word for rights, so the title provides a good sense of the scope of this blog.

In general, I write here about private law, free speech, and cyber law; and, in particular, I write about Irish law and education policy.


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