Author Archives: Paul Levy

Moral Rights and Copyright Claims about Che Guevara Parodies

by Paul Alan Levy The personal and commercial heirs of the deceased photographer Korda, best known for the iconic photograph of Che Guevara that has adorned Tshirts and posters displayed by young admirers for fifty years, have issued a takedown demand to Liberty Maniacs over its sales of parody items that display the photo’s cap […]

Subpoenas to Identify Online Consumer Critics on the Ground That They Weren’t Really Customers

by Paul Alan Levy What sort of showing must a criticized business make when it wants to identify an anonymous online critic on the theory that the critic was never an actual customer and that, consequently, any criticisms are necessarily false? Attorney Thomas P. Kelly III of Santa Rosa California That issue has been presented […]

New challenges for Mathew Higbee and his clients

by Paul Alan Levy About a month ago, I blogged about a new variant in Matthew Higbee’s high-volume copyright enforcement practice on behalf of photographers, in which he was pursuing the hosts of online forums where users had posted copyrighted photographs or deep links to copyrighted photographs, taking advantage of those hosts who had failed […]

ALI Makes Its Tentative Draft Broadly Available to the Public, while Insisting that It Could Sue for Infringement

by Paul Alan Levy As reflected in an update to my blog post from yesterday, ALI has issued a blustery letter insisting that it did no wrong by trying to enforce its copyright against Adam Levitin's publicly posting of the Tentative Draft its Restatement, while at the same time publicly posting the Tentative Draft.

American Law Institute Misusing Copyright to Prop Up Its Proposed Restatement on the Eve of Voting

by Paul Alan Levy The Proposed Restatement of the Law of Consumer Contracts has been discussed on this blog many times. It is exceptionally controversial: it has been opposed by a large coalition of consumer and civil rights advocacy groups (including Public Citizen) as well as attorneys general from roughly half the states. The US […]

Attack on Consumer Free Speech in Texas

by Paul Alan Levy The spring, an unusual coalition of forces made a serious run at gutting the Texas Citizens’ Participation Act, the Texas version of state anti-SLAPP suits that protects consumers and citizen activists from baseless lawsuits intended to stop them from voicing criticisms of businesses and powerful political figure in their communities. A […]

Consumer Warning: Copyright Trolling by Higbee and Associates

Over the past few years, the law firm Higbee and Associates (based in Los Angeles, although it pretentiously labels itself a "National Law Firm") has become identified with a pattern of making aggressive and, in many cases, unsupportable demands for the payment of significant sums of money by individuals and nonprofits whose web sites feature […]