by Paul Alan Levy In response to aggressive reporting on the blog Digital Music News about the contract terms that Apple has imposed on independent labels that lack the economic clout to negotiate their own specific deals regarding iTunes Radio, Apple sent a DMCA takedown notice to Scribd, where the blog had posted the contract […]
Author Archives: Paul Levy
by Paul Alan Levy One of the sweetest things that Public Citizen does each year is recognize a long-time public interest staffer whose work is vital to that staffer's organization, but whose work is sufficiently behind-the-scenes that he or she receives no public recognition. The award is named for Phyllis McCarthy, who started working for […]
by Paul Alan Levy The major ruling of the day: Circuit Judge Denny Chin, sitting as a trial judge because he retained the case after being promoted to the Second Circuit, has granted summary judgment rejecting the Authors Guild’s copyright claims against Google’s program of scanning books into digital form and both offering the digital […]
by Paul Alan Levy In this motion a prosecutor asked a trial judge to order a particular defense lawyer to stop referring to her during jury trials as “the Government” on the ground that jurors would likely take this as a derogatory reference “and is meant to make the State’s attorneys seem oppressive and to […]
by Paul Alan Levy Over the years I have blogged several times about corporate abuses of trademark law to use litigation, or the threat of litigation to block criticism. Because they have so many other tools to deploy against citizens, government agencies usually do not stoop to this level – the City of Memphis aside […]
by Paul Alan Levy Over the past few years I have blogged about our defense of some documentary filmmakers who had to defend the use of the name "Jenzabar" (a software company) in the meta tags and title tag for a web page about a software company called Jenzabar (it was founded by one of […]
by Paul Alan Levy A fun exercise by Jonathan Band estimates the value of Wikipedia at tens of billions of dollars, with this punchline: "Wikipedia demonstrates that highly valuable content can be created by non-professionals [without the incentives provided] by the copyright system."
by Paul Alan Levy A Tampa-area company called “Federal Verification Co.,” which operates under “dozens of names,” according to the author of this exposé on a local television station, has filed a defamation lawsuit against its online critics, and is using vague allegations about defamation on a number of sites as an excuse for a […]
by Paul Alan Levy One of the worst things that can happen to libel plaintiffs is to lose the suit in a way that confirms the veracity of the charges made publicly against it. This is what recently happened to Thomas Cooley law School. Past articles here have discussed its efforts to identify a former […]
by Paul Alan Levy Over the course of more than twenty years of representing union members in litigation over issues of union democracy, before my main focus switched to Internet law and IP issues, I found that in some unions, the leaders think nothing of spending other peoples’ money – the union treasury that is […]