The legal tabloid blog Above the Law posed the question on Friday whether a video posted on YouTube of a group of young men playing on a beach and lipsyncing to Miley Cyrus’s song “Party in the USA” was a fair use.
As a reminder, fair use is a copyright doctrine by which someone who has infringed a copyright can avoid liability. The doctrine began as common law, but was codified by Congress in 17 U.S.C. § 107. As codified, the doctrine consists of four factors: (1) purpose and character of the use, (2) nature of the copyrighted work, (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used, and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or the value of the copyrighted work. If a court (or jury) finds that the factors balance in favor of the user of the copyrighted work, the use is not considered an infringement.
In this post I address Braden Cox’s argument that the EU missed the boat in its fining Intel today, because it didn’t focus a sufficient amount of attention on consumer welfare, choosing instead to look at the competition between Intel and AMD.What Mr. Cox fails to realize is that, even in the United States, our antitrust laws do not focus on whether consumers are better off when compared to where they were before the competition began. Instead, we focus on market power and anticompetitive conduct, because even if consumers are better off, there is no way to know if we could have been benefited even more had there been no anticompetitive behavior.
Britannia, rule the waves: Britons never will be slaves.
I don’t know what it is about British television, but I adore it.Perhaps it’s that the news is balanced and takes a world view.Perhaps it’s that the entertainment programs are less about being sensationalist and more about entertaining people.Or perhaps it’s just that the shows are smarter.Like they say in “Shakespeare in Love,” “I don’t know; it’s a mystery.”(Of course, they were talking about theatre).