Professor Eric Goldman has a post up at his Technology & Marketing Law Blog with an important update on Perfect 10 v. Amazon.com, which I blogged about last May. Specifically, the Ninth Circuit issued an amended opinion Monday that reverses itself on the issue of which party has the burden of proof on a fair use defense in a copyright preliminary injunction context. As Professor Goldman sums up: In the original Ninth Circuit Perfect 10 v. Amazon ruling, the court put the burden on the plaintiff to disprove fair use as part of its PI obligations. Now, in an amended opinion, the Ninth Circuit has put the burden on the…
-
-
Empirical Study of the Fair Use Doctrine
The Fair Use Blog should be a regular destination for any attorney interested in copyright law. This post tips us off to an amazing article by Professor Barton Beebe of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University: An Empirical Study of U.S. Copyright Fair Use Opinions, 1978-2005. Professor Beebe provides detailed statistical analysis. From the summary on his website: This Article presents the results of the first empirical study of our fair use case law to show that much of our conventional wisdom about that case law is wrong. Working from a data set consisting of all reported federal opinions that made substantial use of the Section 107…
-
More Googlelaw
Perfect 10 publishes photographs of nude women and owns the copyrights in those images. Google displays thumbnails of those images in its image search results. Perfect 10 says this is infringement and obtains a preliminary injunction against the practice, but the Ninth Circuit, in Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc., case no. 06-55405 (May 16, 2007), reverses. The most written about aspect of the decision is the court’s finding that Google’s display of thumbnail images in its image search results constitutes a non-infringing “fair use” of the images. Since Perfect 10 failed to show that it was likely to overcome Google’s fair use defense, the court reverses the grant of…