Elisabeth Moriarty

Contact Elisabeth

I love old family movies. You know, those frenetic-yet-nostalgic, motion-sickness-inducing Super 8 films from your childhood? (Believe you me, the cinéma vérité, shaky-cam directors who are currently in vogue have nothing on my dad…) Now that my family’s home movie library has been converted to DVD, there are endless opportunities to force my husband to watch me and my mom ride a camel at “Jungle Habitat” (can I get a shout-out from those of you who grew up in the NY/New Jersey area in the mid-1970’s?) or the fourth of July picnic where the sparkler burned my hand, or — one of my personal favorites — my five year-old self singing “On the Good Ship Lollipop” and dancing the Charleston in the first grade holiday play (trust me, its cuter than it sounds).

And so it was with great anticipation that I prepared our video camera for my seven year-old’s musical theater debut in her summer camp’s production of Grease: The G-Rated Version (no swearing, no teen pregnancy, no smoking, no men rubbing cellophane on their crotches…)

But then we got the letter. Continue reading the full story . . . »

Ken Basin

Contact Ken

Oh, the halcyon days of the summer of ’07! Your kids (or you) were enthralled with their first chance to read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Your 401(K) balance probably had an extra zero or two on the end of it. The “steroid era of baseball” was a mere virtual certainty, rather than a documented fact. None of us had ever heard of a collateralized debt obligation or credit default swap. And I, but a baby lawyer, was enthralled with this crazy new lawsuit filed by Viacom against Google, alleging that Google was itself responsible for $1 billion worth of copyright infringement on its recently-acquired YouTube service. And oh, how the world has changed in these last three years! Teenage vampires have supplanted teenage wizards, you can safely assume that the slugger in your kid’s little league was juicing, we’re all experts on the vagaries of inventing nonexistent wealth with inscrutable financial instruments and then destroying it with other inscrutable financial instruments, and the Viacom lawsuit…well, that’s still going. Continue reading the full story . . . »

Dan Nabel

Contact Dan

On November 14, 2007, then-candidate Barack Obama gave a speechat Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California in which he promised, “I will take a back seat to no one in my commitment to network neutrality. Because once providers start to privilege some applications or websites over others, then the smaller voices get squeezed out and we all lose.”

Less than a year after President Obama took office, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) opened a formal debate on network neutrality. Just over a month ago, however, a federal court’sdecision threw a monkey wrench into the FCC’s plans to fulfill President Obama’s commitment. Continue reading the full story . . . »

Julia Haye

Contact Julia

In 1968, Andy Warhol exhibited his first international retrospective at the Moderna Museet gallery in Stockholm. The exhibition catalogue contained the well-known phrase: “In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes.” Warhol repeated that phrase in 1979, stating that his “prediction from the sixties finally came true.” Now that we live in a world in which a video clip can go viral within hours, Warhol’s “prediction” seems more like an understatement — though if Warhol could see the “Numa Numa” guy for himself, he might not actually take much pride in his predictive powers.

Unfortunately — or, for those who view the Internet as an all-you-can-eat buffet to their insatiable appetite for attention, fortunately — more and more people are finding themselves thrust into surprising (and often unwanted) Internet stardom. So, what can you do if you become an unwilling Internet meme? (That is, besides closing your eyes and waiting for your 15 minutes to expire.) Well, it depends. Continue reading the full story . . . »

Elisabeth Moriarty

Contact Elisabeth

Science-fiction author and futurist Arthur C. Clarke famously formulated three laws of prediction, the first of which posits: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” The same could be said of copyright law.

If you believe categorically that something is not copyrightable, you may well be wrong. You have a much better shot at being right if you conclude that this something possibly could be copyrightable, because the answer to the question “Is it subject to copyright protection?” is, more often than not, “It depends.” In other words, the law of copyright is weird, wacky and wonderful. Continue reading the full story . . . »

Dan Nabel

Contact Dan

There is an old Chinese proverb which cautions against drawing attention to something you are trying to conceal. As the story goes, a man named Zhang built a small fortune of 300 ounces of silver through hard work. Fearful that someone might steal his fortune, Zhang decided that the best thing to do was bury it. After burying the money, Zhang then had a brilliant idea to further ensure his money’s security. He decided to mark the spot with a sign that read: “This land does not have 300 ounces of silver buried here.” Continue reading the full story . . . »