Showing posts with label copyright. Show all posts
Showing posts with label copyright. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 7, 2024

Curators decry parody souvenirs, claim quasi-copyright

D 'n' me at the Accademia in June.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0
David's genitals are all the rage in Florentine touristic fashion, and some observers see a kind of intellectual property (IP) problem.

Italian law has pioneered the protection of cultural heritage since the 15th century (Mannoni), centuries before Italian unification. Medici rulers limited the export of art in the 19th century (Calabi). In the 20th century, a 1909 law asserted a public interest in protecting items "at least 50 years old and 'of historical, archaeological, paleo-anthropological interest'" (N.Y. Times).

Italy continued to lead in protective legal measures in modern times. A public responsibility to safeguard the national patrimony was enshrined in the post-war constitution in 1948 and became the basis of a "complex public organization" (Settis). According to Giambrone Law, Italy was the first nation to have a police division specially assigned to protect cultural heritage. Italy embraced a 2022 European treaty on cultural protection with aggressive amendments to domestic criminal law (LoC). Woe be to the Kazakh tourist who carved his initials into a Pompeii wall this summer (e.g., Smithsonian).

Italian legal protection has extended beyond the physical. A 2004 code of cultural heritage limited visual reproductions of national patrimony without prior approval by the controlling institution and payment of a fee to the institution. 

That measure caused more than a little hand-wringing in copyright circles, as the law seemed to reclaim art from the public domain. The Italian Ministry of Culture doubled down with regulations in 2023, even as the EU moved to strengthen the single-market IP strategy.

Probably needless to say, images of famous works of Italian art are sold widely, in Italy and elsewhere, on everything from frameable prints to refrigerator magnets. Enforcement of the cultural heritage law is thin on the ground, but the government has scored some significant wins against high-profile violators.

A recent AP News story by Coleen Barry described the latest outbreak of this IP-vs.-free-speech conflict, this time over images of David. Cecilie Hollberg, director of the Galleria dell’Accademia, where David resides, has decried vendors who profit from "debase[ment]" of David's image.

Aprons for sale, 2010.
Willem via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0
I saw David in late June. It was the second time I visited him; my first visit was in 1996. I don't well remember Florence from that long ago. But this time I surely was surprised by the quantity and variety of David gear available for sale on the streets around the Accademia, especially the sort of gear that Hollberg is talking about. David has become a character in every variety of indecent meme and crude joke about drinking and sex. David's penis is a favorite outtake.

These uses of David's image especially implicate moral rights in copyright law. Moral rights aim to protect the dignity of creators against distasteful uses and associations. However, as such, moral rights typically end with the life of the creator. Michelangelo died in 1564. The theory behind the cultural heritage code is indicated by the very word "patrimony": that there is a kind of inherited public ownership of classical works, thus entitling them to ongoing moral protection.

Copyright in U.S. law and in the common law tradition in the 20th century was slow to recognize moral rights, which have a storied history in continental law, especially in France and in the civil law tradition. But common law countries came around, at least most of the way. Broader recognition of moral rights was motivated principally by treaty obligations seeking to harmonize copyright. A secondary motivation might have been a proliferation of offensiveness in the multimedia age.

Hollberg has been the complainant behind multiple enforcement actions. Barry reported: "At Hollberg's behest, the state's attorney office in Florence has launched a series of court cases invoking Italy's landmark cultural heritage code .... The Accademia has won hundreds of thousands of euros in damages since 2017, Hollberg said." Not a bad side hustle.

David's shapely backside is not to be underestimated.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0
EU regulators are looking into the legal conflict between free artistic expression and protection of cultural heritage, Barry wrote. My inclination to classical liberalism puts a thumb on the scale for me in favor of the commercial appropriators. I'm uncomfortable with inroads on the public domain. There already is excessive such impingement on creative freedom: inter alia, abusively lengthy copyright terms, chaos around orphan works, prophylactic notice and take-down, and publisher-defined fair use. The idea of removing permissible uses from the public domain is antithetical to liberal norms.

At the same time, I get the frustration of authorities. The average family visiting the dignified Accademia, eager to induce a much-needed appreciation for history and art in the youngest generation, first must navigate the cultural gutter.

Monday, September 11, 2023

Gladstone, Doctorow game out tech reg quagmire

Cory Doctorow
Houari B. via Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
On the Media's Brooke Gladstone talked to Cory Doctorow, author, internet activist, etc., on September 1 about, well, everything, and it's a breathtaking hour of must-listen radio.

The conversation wrapped up every issue I care about in technology and society today into a neat and intelligible bundle of the utter mess that it is: intellectual property, antitrust, privacy and data protection, politics and corruption, and the corporatocracy that's incinerating democracy. Doctorow is more optimistic than I that human civilization can yet be saved, so the program is not even a downer in the end.

I feel like I'm someone who knows a fair bit about this stuff, so I was humbled by how much I learned. I want to spill it all here, but I ought not be a spoiler. I'll share just a tidbit.

You know that thing when videos go viral and some average joe or jane inspires another generation of youth to plot a career as a social media sensation?

Yeah, not a thing.  At least not always an organic thing. Companies such as TikTok "twiddle" or "heat up"—terms of art—selected content to make it "viral," even while users think that they collectively are driving virality by demand.

Why? It's a "giant teddy bear" strategy, Doctorow explained. The carney at the fair lets an early player on one of those unwinnable-by-design games "win" the giant teddy bear, knowing that that customer will carry it around all night, inadvertently advertising the game to everyone else. The viral video maker thinks that a million people just loved that nutty dance and doesn't even realize that she or he is a tool, carrying the giant teddy bear around.

How do the companies get away with telling us one thing and doing something else? Because they change the rules whenever they like, Doctorow said. There are no rules about how they can change the rules.

Huzaifa abedeen via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0
And don't even get me started on the plethora of legal mechanisms that protect this monstrous Big Tech monopolization. Dare to start asking questions, and you'll find yourself on the business end of demand letters citing the DMCA, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and patent and trademark law, just to get the ball rolling.

Yes, I realize that I am writing on a Google platform right now. What's a writer to do? I confess, I made a conscious decision at one point simply to surrender to Google. I have a Nest doorbell, a Pixel phone, and a Google Drive. But, you see, this is what Doctorow is talking about. It's next to impossible to get along in the virtual world today without surrendering.  Try buying diapers from Diapers.com instead of Amazon.

Doctorow is a big fan of Lina Khan and the example she's setting with the Federal Trade Commission's sudden scrutiny of the tech sector. Unfortunately, Doctorow said, it's easier to stop monopoly from happening than to dismantle it after it's taken hold. If you're my age, you'll remember how long AT&T reigned supreme before the feds came a-knockin'. Better late than never. I'll be interested to see if Khan-ology persists, or corporate power in Washington is now too big to break.

The podcast is How Big Tech Went to Sh*t, from WNYC's On the Media (Sept. 1, 2023).

Wednesday, May 10, 2023

OER saves students money, but printing is too pricey

Markus BĂ¼sges (leomaria design)
fĂ¼r Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Open educational resources (OER) are all the rage in higher education, but the cost of hard copies for students remains a problem.

At a panel on OER at a UMass Dartmouth teaching and learning conference in January, I had the privilege of talking about my experience using Tortz, my own textbook for 1L Torts (chapters 1-7 online, remainder in development and coming soon). Ace librarian Emma Wood kindly invited me to co-pontificate with Professor Elisabeth Buck and Dean Shannon Jenkins on a panel, "The Price is Wrong: Lowering Textbook Costs with OER and Other Innovations." Wood is co-author, with law librarian Misty Peltz-Steele (my wife), of Open Your Casebooks Please: Identifying Alternatives to Langdell's Legacy (on this blog).

My campus is pushing for OER, and for good reason. We all know how exorbitant book costs have become for students. And academic authors are hardly beneficiaries of the proceeds. The first book I joined as a co-author in 2006, for 1L Torts, bore a sale price in the neighborhood of $100. I received $1 to $2 per book (and gave to charity the dollars generated by my own students). My students for the last two years have paid nothing for Tortz.  Besides the cost savings, I get to teach from materials I wrote, compiled, and edited, so I know the content and how to use it better than I could anyone else's.

My students' book for 1L Property this past academic year cost $313. It's an excellent book, and I'm not knocking the professor who chose it. Developing my own materials for a foundational course is a labor-intensive project that I felt I could tackle only with the freedom, afforded by tenure, to set my own agenda, and some 20 years' experience teaching torts. At that, I've benefited and borrowed heavily from the pedagogy of a treasured mentor, Professor Marshall Shapo. Without the opportunity to have invested in Tortz, I'd be using a pricey commercial book, too.

A necessary aside: Technically speaking, my book is not OER, because I retain copyright. By definition, I'm told by higher education officials, "OER" must be made available upon a Creative Commons license, or released into the public domain. That's an irrevocable commitment. I'm not willing to do that. In my experience working with higher education institutions around the world, I have found that some out there would seize on freely available intellectual property while profiting handsomely from students desperate for opportunity. In such a case, I would rather negotiate a license and decide myself what to do with any proceeds. I freely licensed Tortz to my own students for the last two years. This is an interesting problem, but for another time.

So Tortz has been working out well. But now I'm looking at a roadblock: hard copies.

For the past two years, I have taught Torts I and II only to small night classes, and I've provided them with hard copies of the text. I made the hard copies on our faculty copiers, and the numbers were small enough not to be of concern for our budget. But beginning in the fall, I'll have two sections of torts, day and night, anticipating 70 or so students. That's too many prints to fold hard copies into the office budget.

I need my students to have hard copies for many reasons. The first issue is comprehension. For me, a reader of a certain age, I still have trouble absorbing content from a screen as well as from a page. When it's important for me to get it, I print a hard copy to read. Many of my law students, of all ages, but especially non-traditional and part-time students, share my preference. When I did a peer teaching observation for my colleague in property law, I saw students using both online and hard-copy versions of the $313 book. A hard-copy user told me that she uses the online version, but still needs to highlight and "engage with the text" to process the content on the first go.

A second issue arises in the exam. I prefer to give my 1L students an open-materials but closed-universe exam. I find that a closed-book exam tests more memorization than analytical skill, while an open-universe exam tests principally resistance to distraction. Regardless, it's my pedagogical choice. The problem is that the exam software we use locks students out of all computer access besides the exam. For any materials they're allowed to have, namely, the book, they need to have an old-fashioned hard copy.

So how to put hard copies in 70 students' hands without re-introducing the cost problem?

As is typical, my university has a contract with a bookstore operator, and book sales are supposed to go through the bookstore. The bookstore uses a contractor for printing. The contractor, XanEdu, after weeks of calculation, priced my book for the fall semester only: a ready-made PDF of 619 pages with basic RGB screen (not photo-quality) color, at $238 per print. That's a non-starter.

Printing at Office Depot would cost just a bit more than that. My university no longer has a print center, but I think its prices when there was one were comparable to retail.

A print-on-demand company, Lulu, was founded by Red Hat tech entrepreneur Bob Young, who became frustrated with the traditional publishing industry when he wanted to tell his own story. Lulu priced out at just $27 per book, which definitely makes one wonder what's going on at XanEdu. Lulu charges about $12 to ship, USPS Priority, but that takes up to 11 business days, which is far too long for students to order only once school starts. Also, it's not clear to me whether I can offer print on demand consistently with the university's bookstore contract. The bookstore has not answered my query as to what the mark-up would be to pre-order copies in bulk from Lulu.

I've kicked the issue upstairs, so to speak, to the law school administration. The associate dean promised to take the question up more stairs, to the university. Budgeting is above my pay grade, after all. I'd like to see the university support OER by volunteering to eat the printing costs. If I'm pleasantly surprised, I'll let you know. It's more likely the university will offer to deduct the costs from my pay.

Anyway, I am excited about OER, or freely licensed "OER," as a game changer for me to be more effective in the classroom. I appreciate that my university supports the OER initiative at least in spirit, and I am grateful to have been included in Emma Wood's thought-provoking discussion with Professor Buck and Dean Jenkins.

Wednesday, July 27, 2022

Publishers crush state effort to ensure that public libraries have reasonable access to e-books

Cartridge People CC BY 2.0 via Flickr
A Maryland law requiring the licensing of electronic books to public libraries on reasonable terms is preempted by federal copyright law, a federal court ruled in June.

A Maryland statute enacted in 2021 provided that e-book publishers "shall offer to license the electronic literary product to public libraries in the State on reasonable terms that would enable public libraries to provide library users with access to the electronic literary product."

The law meant to answer publishers who have been employing oppressive tactics to milk money from public libraries trying to meet patron demand for electronic books. I wrote some about this problem in April 2021.

Alas, the federal court ruled that federal copyright law occupies the field to the exclusion of Maryland legislators' worthy intentions. The court found it unnecessary, therefore, to consider publisher complainants' further claims, such as dormant Commerce Clause.

I'll add this to my list of lost causes in a corporate-captured Congress.

The case is Association of American Publishers, Inc. v. Frosh (D. Md. June 13, 2022), Judge Deborah L. Boardman presiding.

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Sage publishes updated Encyclopedia of Journalism

In March, Sage published the second edition of The Enyclopedia of Journalism (2022).

I was privileged to contribute updated articles on Copyright (previous edition draft) and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) (previous edition draft).

A lot has changed since the first edition more than a decade ago. I am grateful for the editorial leadership of Professor Gregory A. Borchard at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, for his direction and feedback on redrafting the content for the new edition.

Here is the description of the project from Sage.

Journalism permeates our lives and shapes our thoughts in ways that we have long taken for granted. Whether it is National Public Radio in the morning or the lead story on the Today show, the morning newspaper headlines, up-to-the-minute Internet news, grocery store tabloids, Time magazine in our mailbox, or the nightly news on television, journalism pervades our lives. The Encyclopedia of Journalism covers all significant dimensions of journalism, such as print, broadcast, and Internet journalism; U.S. and international perspectives; and history, technology, legal issues and court cases, ownership, and economics. The encyclopedia will consist of approximately 500 signed entries from scholars, experts, and journalists, under the direction of lead editor Gregory Borchard of University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Here is the first paragraph of Copyright.

Copyright is a legal protection of expressions that are fixed in tangible media. Copyright describes, for example, an author’s right to reproduce a book manuscript, an artist’s right to duplicate his painting, or a musician’s right to perform an original score. Copyright is part of a family of legal interests loosely termed intellectual property, which also includes trademarks, patents, and trade secrets. This entry examines the origins of copyright as well as related theory and criticism. The entry also discusses copyright law, the fair use doctrine, and legal issues connected to copyright law. The entry concludes with a discussion of copyright within the context of journalism.

And here is the first paragraph of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is an information disclosure statute that provides the principal means of access to records of the executive branch of the United States federal government. The FOIA, codified at 5 U.S.C. section 552, was enacted in 1966 and has been amended since, significantly by the Electronic FOIA Amendments of 1996 and the OPEN Government Act of 2007. This entry discusses the history of the FOIA, its use today by journalists and others, variations in its interpretation, its influence on other governments, and related laws in the United States.

Saturday, February 26, 2022

Judge Jackson Media Law, Torts Tour: From Big Meat 'COOL' to 'A Love of Food' and 'Everlasting Life'

[A revised version of this post is available to download as a paper on SSRN.]
The Hon. KBJ (Wikicago CC BY-SA 4.0)

Profiles of U.S. Circuit Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson have proliferated since her announcement as a leading contender for the U.S. Supreme Court seat vacated by Justice Breyer, and President Biden announced her nomination yesterday.

Judge Jackson has practiced in both criminal and civil environments, and in public and private sectors.  She focused in different practice roles on criminal law and appellate litigation, and she served on the federal bench at the trial and appellate levels.  So much of her work, and that which has garnered the most attention, for example in the excellent SCOTUSblog profile by Amy Howe, interests me as a citizen in general more than as an academic and media-law-and-torts aficionado.

Nevertheless, I compiled here cases of interest to me, which I found whilst poking around in her trial-court record on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (D.D.C.).  You might not see these discussed elsewhere, but they might be of interest to comparative-bent, media-law types like me, if that's even a thing.  In my ordinary-joe capacity, I am not in step with Judge Jackson's inclinations in some other areas of law.  But any Supreme Court Justice, just like any political candidate, is going to be a mixed bag, especially in a compulsorily two-party system.

In the cases below, a decidedly unscientific sample, I like some of what I see, especially skeptical diligence in access-to-information cases, sound reasoning in intellectual property law, careful application of preemption doctrine in medical-product liability, and a couple of thought-provoking First Amendment entanglements.  I see a mixed record on venue for transnational cases, something I've been worrying about lately, but the outcomes are defensible as consistent with lousy U.S. law.


Main topics:
● Civil procedure/statute of limitations:
WMATA v. Ark Union Sta., Inc. (2017)
Copyright/music royalties: Alliance of Artists & Recording Cos. v. Gen. Motors Co. (2018)
Defamation, false light/actual malice: Zimmerman v. Al Jazeera Am., LLC (2017)
First Amendment/child pornography: United States v. Hillie (2018)
First Amendment/commercial speech, compelled speech: Am. Meat Inst. v. U.S. Dept. Agric. (2013)
FOIA/national security, law enforcement: Elec. Privacy Info. Ctr. v. U.S. Dept. Justice (2017)
FOIA/Vaughn index, trade secrets, deliberative process: McKinley v. FDIC (2017)
FOIA/deliberative process/personal privacy: Conservation Force v. Jewell (2014)
FSIA/CCFA, forum non conveniens: Azima v. RAK Invest. Auth. (2018)
FSIA/torture: Azadeh v. Iran (2018)
Insurance/settlement: Blackstone v. Brink (2014)
Product liability/causation, preemption, learned intermediary: Kubicki v. Medtronic (2018)
Trademark/infringement: Yah Kai World Wide Enter. v. Napper (2016)
Wrongful death/sovereign immunity, contributory negligence: Whiteru v. WMATA (2017)
Wrongful death, product liability/forum non conveniens: In re Air Crash ... So. Indian Ocean (2018)

Quirky pro se claims:
Defamation/litigation privilege/statute of limitations: Ray v. Olender (2013)
Copyright/infringement: Buchanan v. Sony Music Ent. (2020)
Copyright/pleading: Butler v. Cal. St. Disbursement Unit (2013)
Copyright/subject-matter jurisdiction: Miller v. Library of Congress (2018)
FTCA/FOIA, civil rights: Cofield v. United States (2014)
Legal profession/sovereign immunity, absolute immunity: Smith v. Scalia (2014)

And the case with the best name:
A Love of Food I v. Maoz Vegetarian USA (2014)


WMATA (D.C. Metro) (Max Pixel CC0)
Civil procedure/statute of limitations.  WMATA v. Ark Union Sta., Inc., 269 F. Supp. 3d 196 (D.D.C. 2017).  The transit authority of the District of Columbia alleged that negligent maintenance by the Union Station America Restaurant, defendants' enterprise, resulted in a burst sewer pipe that severely damaged the Metro Red Line in 2011.  Judge Jackson opened the opinion cleverly, with what could almost be a dad joke: "This is a case about whose interests the [WMATA] serves when it spends money to repair damaged transit infrastructure in the Metrorail system—a proverbial third rail of this region's politics."  (My emphasis.  How could I not?)

D.C. has a generous five-year statute of limitations, but even that time had run.  Determining that the corporate-body WMATA remained a creature of government for relevant purposes, evidenced by its operational subsidies—cf. WMATA, infra, in negligence/sovereign immunity—Judge Jackson applied "the common law nullum tempus doctrine, which dates back to the thirteenth century," to exempt WMATA, as sovereign, from the statute of limitations.  The court explained: "Although the nullum tempus doctrine originated as a 'prerogative of the Crown[,]' the doctrine's 'survival in the United States has been generally accounted for and justified on grounds of policy rather than upon any inherited notions of the personal privilege of the king.' .... Specifically, 'the source of its continuing vitality ... is to be found in the great public policy of preserving the public rights, revenues, and property from injury and loss, by the negligence of public officers'" (citations omitted).

Pixabay
Copyright/music royalties.  Alliance of Artists & Recording Cos. v. Gen. Motors Co., 306 F. Supp. 3d 422 (D.D.C. 2018).  Judge Jackson dismissed a trade-group-plaintiff claim against automakers that their in-car CD hard drives created digital music recordings (DMRs) within the meaning of the federal statute, the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 (AHRA), entitling copyright holders to royalties.  The AHRA was intended by Congress to protect the music industry against the alarming ease of creating high-fidelity copies of digital music by requiring manufacturers, importers, and distributors to employ copy-control technology.  Though having earlier allowed the claim to proceed against other technical challenges under the AHRA, the court decided, with the benefit of the first phase of discovery, that the defendant automakers' devices were not digital audio recording devices within the meaning of the statute.  In a methodical analysis, Judge Jackson explained that the content of the hard drives was excluded from the statutory definition of a DMR because of the coordinate presence of play software and other data.  The court rejected industry's theory that the appropriate frame of analysis was a particular partition of the drive, where music code might be located more readily.  The D.C. Circuit affirmed, 947 F.3d 849 (2020).

Zimmerman
(All Pro Reels CC BY-SA 2.0)
Defamation, false light/actual malice.  Zimmerman v. Al Jazeera Am., LLC, 246 F. Supp. 3d 257 (D.D.C. 2017).  Two professional baseball players, both called Ryan (a Zimmerman and a Howard), sued Al Jazeera America over a documentary, The Dark Side: Secrets of the Sports Dopers (2015), in which an interviewee linked the pair to performance-enhancing drugs.  The plaintiffs were clearly public figures, so actual malice was at issue.  In a thorough explication of the making of the film followed by a straightforward recitation of the media torts, Judge Jackson narrowed the plaintiffs' claims to allegations stated in the film, excluding liability for promotional content.  The court found it plausible, upon "contextual clues," that a reasonable viewer could attribute the interviewee's statements to the filmmakers: "The film weaves [the source's] statements into a broader narrative about doping in sports that the producers themselves have purportedly confirmed through their own investigation."  Judge Jackson then explicated the actual malice standard and its amped up, St. Amant, iteration of recklessness.  Critically, the plaintiffs alleged that the source had recanted his claims about the Ryans during a subsequent, yet pre-publication, interview, giving Al Jazeera serious cause to doubt the source's veracity, if not actual knowledge of falsity.

Naturally, this case might be of interest to Court watchers, given the present hubbub over the Sullivan actual malice standard.  I'm no fan, and I'll have more to say about that in the future.  Zimmerman hardly depicts a Judge Jackson ready to pitch in with Justices Thomas and Gorsuch to upend the status quo.  But she understands the standard and at least might be amenable to a semantically sincere construction of "reckless disregard."

First Amendment/child pornography.  United States v. Hillie, 289 F. Supp. 3d 188 (D.D.C. 2018).  Criminal cases are not usually my jam, but this one had a First Amendment angle.  Judge Jackson allowed conviction of a defendant for sexual exploitation of a minor and possession of images of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct.  On the facts as explicated by the court, that sure seems like it was the defendant's intent: "carefully placing and positioning the camera in hidden locations in J.A.A.'s bedroom and bathroom" and "succeed[ing] in capturing several extended images of J.A.A.'s exposed genitals."  Missing, though, was the express "lasciviousness" required by federal statutes, a fatal flaw for the prosecution, the D.C. Circuit ruled.  14 F.4th 677 (2021).  The defendant relied on statutes, not the First Amendment, but the D.C. Circuit referenced First Amendment case law extensively to support its interpretation of what Congress required.  Despite the substantial latitude to which the government is entitled to prosecute child pornography, beyond the legal constraints of outlawing obscenity as to adults, the appellate court concluded that Judge Jackson erred in permitting the jury to infer the defendant's lascivious objective.  One might expect that social conservatives would side with Judge Jackson on this case. 

Labeled French beef
(by Yuka for Open Food Facts CC BY-SA 3.0)
First Amendment/commercial speech, compelled speech.  Am. Meat Inst. v. U.S. Dept. Agric., 968 F. Supp. 2d 38 (D.D.C. 2013).  This must have been a grilling initiation to the federal bench for Judge Jackson.  A meat industry trade association challenged "country of origin labeling" regulations (truly, "the COOL Rule") promulgated by the Department of Agriculture, on, as one might expect from Big Meat, any legal theory that might stick to the cast iron: namely, the statutory authority of the Agricultural Marketing Act, promulgation under the Administrative Procedure Act, and the First Amendment.  The first two make my eyes glaze over; it's the First Amendment that grabbed me.  Meat and the First Amendment are, of course, long-time frenemies, going back to the heyday of The Jungle, and on through the secret grocery workers of journalism ethics fame.  Then there was the whole pink slime era, and animal-welfare activists came trespassing through to take pictures.  Oh how we laughed until we cried.

Anyway, in this case, Judge Jackson capably explicated the niche case law of compelled commercial speech and charted the fine if squiggly line separating free speech and business regulation.  The risk of deception was more than merely speculative here, she opined, and consumers were demonstrably confused.  Industry mistakenly claimed a burden on its pocketbook, rather than its speech rights, Judge Jackson admonished.  The COOL Rule was reasonable and hardly burdensome for its expectation of truthful and uncontroversial disclosure.  Preliminary injunction was denied.

Big Meat was not easily deterred; the case went for a rodeo ride the following year.  The D.C. Circuit affirmed, 746 F.3d 1065 (Mar. 28, 2014), vacated upon granting rehearing en banc, No. 13-5281 (Apr. 4, 2014), and then reinstated affirmance (July 29, 2014).

U.S. Defense Department image (C)
FOIA/national security, law enforcement.  Elec. Privacy Info. Ctr. v. U.S. DOJ, 296 F. Supp. 3d 109 (2017).  Privacy advocate EPIC sued DOJ under the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to learn more about past wiretap spying under the post-9/11 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.  EPIC was especially keen to see how the government had justified surveillance requests it set before the famously amenable Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).  Namely, EPIC sought: "(1) Westlaw printouts that were attached to a certain brief that the government submitted to the [FISC], and (2) portions of certain reports that DOJ issued to Congress, consisting of summaries of FISC legal opinions, descriptions of the scope of the FISC's jurisdiction, and discussions of process improvements."  DOJ produced a Vaughn index.  Ex parte and in camera, Judge Jackson reviewed the materials and adjudged them properly withheld under exemptions 1 (national security as to the congressional reports), and 3 and 7(E) (national security statutes and law enforcement techniques, as to everything else), with some nitpicks as to redactions and notations.  I'm sure EPIC did not care for the result, but the transparency problem seems to be a statutory one.  Judge Jackson did a pretty deep dive on the docs.

FOIA/Vaughn index, trade secrets, deliberative process.  McKinley v. FDIC, 268 F. Supp. 3d 234 (D.D.C. 2017), then No. 1:15-cv-1764 (D.D.C. Sept. 30, 2018).  Judicial Watch, per experienced FOIA-requester attorney Michael Bekesha, represented a plaintiff against the FDIC.  In the reported opinion in 2017, the court compelled the FDIC to produce a Vaughn index. The Judicial Watch plaintiff was investigating FDIC placement of Citibank into receivership in 2008 and 2009.  The FDIC sought to protect 12 documents as trade secrets and eight documents as deliberative process.  The court faulted the FDIC for failing to support either claim of exemption with any contextual explanation, including the nature of its decision-making authority on the latter claim.

I note that Judge Jackson's reasoning on the trade-secret analysis might have been undermined subsequently by the Supreme Court's industry-deferential ruling on exemption 4 in Food Marketing Inst. v. Argus Leader Media (U.S. 2019).  (I signed on to an amicus on the losing side in FMI.)  In an earlier FOIA case, Government Accountability Project v. FDA, 206 F. Supp. 3d 420 (D.D.C. 2016), Judge Jackson similarly relied on pre-FMI doctrine to reject, as unduly conclusory, FDA resistance, at the behest of a pharma trade association, to production of records on antimicrobial medications.

Vaughn index in hand on remand, plaintiff persisted in challenging the adequacy of the FDIC search and "whether withheld information 'has already been made public through an official and documented disclosure.'"  Judge Jackson rejected both claims in a short opinion in 2018.  She found the first merely speculative.  As to the second, the plaintiff "argued that the FDIC's withholdings were improper because the requested information was 'officially' acknowledged by Former FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair in the book Bull by the Horns—a book that Bair published after leaving office."  Judge Jackson held that "that contention, too, must be rejected. A book or other material that a former government official publishes in her personal capacity does not qualify as an 'official acknowledgment' of the information contained therein for the purpose of FOIA."

Bison trophy at Beaty Biodiversity Museum, Vancouver, B.C.
(by Nikkimaria CC BY-SA 3.0)
FOIA/deliberative process, personal privacy.  Conservation Force v. Jewell, 66 F. Supp. 3d 46 (D.D.C. 2014).   A nonprofit foundation that promotes big-game hunting sued U.S. Fish and Wildlife, in the Department of Interior, under the FOIA to obtain records related to denials of permits that would allow the import into the United States of hunting trophies of Canadian bison.  For the record, I'm fine with denying those permits, and I could be persuaded to block importation of the hunters, too.  Nevertheless, transparency....  

Judge Jackson authored a workmanlike exploration of various exemption theories asserted by Interior: accepting attorney-client privilege (exemption 5) and personal-information exemption (6); rejecting deliberative-process exemption, crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege, and work product privilege (all exemption 5).  She cited House reports to bolster her interpretations of what exemptions 5 and 6 require.  In a pattern that became familiar, or maybe just speaks to agency neglect, she faulted Interior for a conclusory ("woefully short") Vaughn index that failed to support exemption.  As to exemption 6, which has been aggressively enlarged by federal courts in furtherance of the privacy rage, Judge Jackson accepted Interior's redaction of employee personal information as more or less immaterial to the sought-after accountability.  The D.C. Circuit affirmed summarily in No. 15-5131 (Dec. 4, 2015).

FSIA/CFAA; forum non conveniens.  Azima v. RAK Invest. Auth., 305 F. Supp. 3d 149 (D.D.C. 2018).  Judge Jackson was reversed in this one, 926 F.3d 870 (D.C. Cir. 2019), but I prefer her analysis.  Under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and for common law conversion and unfair competition, plaintiff, a Kansas City, Mo., businessman, sued a business partner, a public investment authority (RAKIA) of the United Arab Emirates (UAE, specifically the Emirate of Ras Al Khaimah), after their business relationship soured, alleging that RAKIA "commissioned the repeated surreptitious hacking of his personal and business laptops ... and then published disparaging material that was illicitly gleaned from Azima's computers...."  RAKIA sought dismissal under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) on grounds of sovereign immunity, under a contractual forum selection clause, and, relatedly, under the common law venue doctrine of forum non conveniens.

Judge Jackson rejected all three grounds.  The plaintiff plausibly portrayed RAKIA, an investor rather than governing entity, as a commercial actor and alleged tortfeasor, bringing into play the FSIA commercial and tort exceptions.  As alleged, the hacking would have inserted malware into the plaintiff's computer systems, even if the insertion occurred abroad, so the locus of alleged tortious injury was Kansas City, bolstering the FSIA analysis.  The forum selection clause did not pertain, Judge Jackson reasoned, because it was articulated in the parties' contract for a prior commercial venture; the contract hardly covered subsequent hacking.

As to venue, Judge Jackson faulted RAKIA for failing to meet its "heavy burden" to show that Azima would get a fair shake in RAKIA's preferred venue of London, where RAKIA might have hoped for a more favorable outcome on immunity.  I like that analysis—but cf. infra, re wrongful death/forum non conveniens.  My comparative law class just read Professor Vivian Curran's masterful recent work on foreign law in U.S. courts, in which she convincingly demonstrated U.S. federal judges' penchant to over-employ forum non conveniens and thus shirk their responsibility to adjudicate.  

Perhaps proving Prof. Curran's thesis, the D.C. Circuit disagreed, holding that the forum selection clause burdened the plaintiff with having to show why London would not work as an appropriate venue, else face dismissal for forum non conveniens.  I would be remiss not to mention also: Prof. Curran further faulted the courts for lazy reliance on partisan evidence (my words) when foreign law is concerned, and both Judge Jackson and the D.C. Circuit declared a lack of any responsibility to investigate themselves the adequacy of London as a forum.

FSIA/torture.  Azadeh v. Iran, 318 F. Supp. 3d 90 (D.D.C. 2018).  Plaintiff was an inmate of an Iranian jail and alleged torture and intentional torts at the hands of the republic.  A U.S. court ruling in such a matter is principally symbolic.  Iran will not respond; a plaintiff might hope to recover against a U.S. government claim on frozen assets.  Accordingly, in this case, a magistrate judge recommended entering default judgment in favor of the plaintiff.  I have here omitted cases in which Judge Jackson adopted in toto a magistrate's report; in this case, she did not.

Relying on a manual of the U.S. district courts, the plaintiff had effected service on the state of Iran erroneously, under the wrong order of process under the FSIA.  Judge Jackson wrote: "Judges are sometimes called upon to set aside heart-wrenching and terrible facts about a claimant's treatment at the hands of a defendant and enforce seemingly draconian, technical mandates of law. This is an especially difficult duty when the machinery of the judicial system itself appears to have played a role in the claimant's mistaken view of the applicable legal requirements. The somber circumstances of the instant case present one such scenario...."  The court put the default judgment on hold and gave the plaintiff a second crack at proper service.  Judge Jackson subsequently entered default judgment against Iran, in the sum of $36,411,244, in No. 1:16-cv-1467 (D.D.C. Sept. 5, 2018).  Reproduced therein, the magistrate's report detailed the plaintiff's ordeal.

Insurance/settlement.  Blackstone v. Brink, 63 F. Supp. 3d 68 (D.D.C. 2014) (D.C. law).  In an insurance dispute arising from the alleged wrongful death of a pedestrian, plaintiffs and their attorney apparently changed position on whether to settle with defendant-driver's insurer, State Farm, for the defendant's $100,000 policy limit.  After a telephone conversation, State Farm sent a check and a release form to the plaintiffs' attorney.  The check crossed in the mail with a letter from the attorney rejecting the offer.  Applying D.C. law, Judge Jackson determined that the parties had reached an enforceable agreement on the telephone, evidenced by the specificity of the attorney's instructions on how and where to send the check.  The court wrote of the parties' competing narratives: "On this record, it is far more plausible that [plaintiff counsel] accepted [State Farm's] offer on behalf of his clients [plaintiffs], intended that it be final and binding, and later had misgivings about his earlier decision to accept. Unfortunately for Plaintiffs, courts have long held that such buyer's remorse does not vitiate a demonstrated initial intent to be bound by the settlement agreement" (original emphasis).

A Medtronic product (Alan Levine CC BY 2.0)
Product liability/causation, preemption, learned intermediary.  Kubicki v. Medtronic, 293 F. Supp. 3d 129 (D.D.C. 2018) (D.C. law).  Parents of a diabetic consumer who suffered traumatic brain injury as a result of low blood-sugar levels sued the manufacturers of an insulin pump, alleging various theories of product liability.  Judge Jackson threw out some claims, against one manufacturer and upon one theory, as time barred, because plaintiffs had added them to the complaint too late for the District's three-year statute of limitations.  Judge Jackson navigated the tricky shoals of preemption doctrine to find some but not all liability theories expressly preempted, and the remainder not impliedly preempted, by FDA medical-device approval.  A sliver of remaining plaintiff theories survived summary judgment for presenting triable questions of fact on causation and on the learned intermediary doctrine relative to alleged failure to warn.

Trademark/infringement.  Yah Kai World Wide Enter. v. Napper, 195 F. Supp. 3d 287 (D.D.C. 2016).  The defendant ran the Everlasting Life Restaurant & Lounge as an enterprise of the African Hebrew Israelite community, "who claim to be descendants of biblical Israelites and who follow a strict vegan diet," until their relationship soured.  The plaintiff-community sued when the defendant persisted in doing business as "Everlasting Life," which a community leader had registered as a service mark (pictured).  Trial did not go well for the defense; Judge Jackson wrote that the defendant "displayed some signs of dissembling, such as the evasive nature of his answers with respect to the existence of a purportedly independent and unincorporated food business that he claimed to have created by himself in his home garage prior to the Community's formation of its restaurant businesses."  The court found likelihood of confusion and, accordingly, infringement.  If only defendant had partnered with Big Meat to serve litigious hungry hunters returning from Canada.

Wrongful death/sovereign immunity, contributory negligence.  Whiteru v. WMATA, 258 F. Supp. 3d 175 (2017).  This time the WMATA, the D.C. transit authority, was a negligent defendant rather than plaintiff—cf. WMATA, supra, in civil procedure/statute of limitations—and this time, the authority was ruled not sovereign for purposes of immunity.  In what was essentially a slip-and-fall, the plaintiff-decedent's estate and parents blamed the WMATA for not discovering the decedent—a lawyer, by the way—injured on a train platform, in time to provide life-saving medical treatment.  A creature of state compact and D.C. statute, the WMATA enjoys an immunity analogous to that of federal defendants under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA).  Borrowing the FTCA rule of immunity for discretionary governmental functions, which often presents a frame-of-reference problem in its granular application, Judge Jackson rejected the WMATA theory that officials' conduct was discretionary.  Rather, properly, I think, the court accepted the plaintiff's framing of the case as alleging unreasonable comportment with the WMATA standard operating procedures for platform inspection.

At that time in 2017, factual questions in the case precluded summary judgment.  However, in 2020, Judge Jackson awarded the WMATA summary judgment upon the plaintiff's contributory negligence.  480 F. Supp. 3d 185.  The District is not a comparative fault jurisdiction.  The plaintiff's heavy intoxication when he fell was undisputed, and, Judge Jackson opined, video evidence plainly showed that the plaintiff fell because he over-relied on a low wall for support.  Just this month, the D.C. Circuit reversed and remanded,  ___ F.4th ___ (Feb. 11, 2022), holding that under D.C. law for common-carrier liability, contributory negligence is not the complete defense that it usually is in negligence in the District.

Suggested search area for MH370 debris
(Andrew Heneen CC BY 4.0)
Wrongful death, product liability/forum non conveniens.  In re Air Crash Over the Southern Indian Ocean, 352 F. Supp. 3d 19 (D.D.C. 2018) (multi-district litigation).  This case marks a tragic disappointment.  Judge Jackson dismissed for improper venue, forum non conveniens, the claims of families of passengers of missing airliner MH370 against defendants including Malaysia Airlines and Boeing.  The claims arose under the Montreal Convention on international air carriage, common law wrongful death, and product liability.  The thrust of the problem is that what happened to MH370, including the final resting place of the fuselage and an understanding of what went wrong, remains a mystery, and even less was known in 2018.  My money is on pilot hijacking, by the way; read more in the definitive account to date by the incomparable William Langewiesche for The Atlantic. 

Judge Jackson opined:

All told, the Montreal Convention cases in this MDL involve only six U.S. citizens with a direct connection to the Flight MH370 tragedy, as either plaintiffs or decedents. Among the hundreds of passengers on that flight, only three were citizens of the United States, and while the United States undoubtedly has a strong public interest in the claims involving their deaths, its interest pales in comparison to Malaysia's interest in litigating these claims. Malaysia's public interest includes not only an interest in the untimely deaths of the Malaysian pilot and crew, but also an interest in determining precisely what happened to Flight MH370, given that a Malaysian airline owned, operated, and maintained the aircraft; the flight took off from an airport in Malaysia for a destination outside the United States; and it disappeared from radar when Malaysian air traffic controllers were handing off the flight. And Malaysian authorities made substantial investments of time and resources in the wake of this disaster: Malaysia conducted extensive civil and criminal investigations, and changes in Malaysian law led to the creation of a new national Malaysian airline. It is Malaysia's strong interest in the events that give rise to the claims at issue here that makes this a distinctly Malaysian tragedy, notwithstanding the presence of the few Americans onboard Flight MH370. 

I really want to lash out against this reasoning.  But probably it would be like when I was a little kid fed up with allergy-testing shots and kicked my doctor.  Despite my reservations about forum non conveniens, see Prof. Curran, supra, I admit that my frustration stems from doubt that the case could be fairly prosecuted in Malaysia, even if the plane is found, rather than a confidence that the United States is a logical venue.  It might not even matter, as the Montreal Convention probably would curb recovery even in U.S. courts.  Insofar as I have any legitimate gripe, it's in part that forum non conveniens is just a witless rule out of step with a globalized world, and in part that Judge Jackson should have done some independent investigation of the adequacy of Malaysia as a forum.

The aftermath of the MH370 disappearance revealed concerning deficits in transparency, and, thus, potentially in accountability, in the Malaysian investigative process.  And while I don't think Boeing is to blame, having watched Downfall: The Case Against Boeing (2022) on Netflix just last weekend—Langewiesche wrote about the 737 MAX for The New York Times—leaves me distrustful.  Indeed, however relying upon precedent, Judge Jackson declined MH370 plaintiffs' last-ditch demand that, at least, Boeing be compelled to promise to abide by U.S. discovery in connection with any subsequent litigation abroad.

The D.C. Circuit affirmed, 946 F.3d 607, and the Supreme Court denied cert., 141 S. Ct. 451, in 2020.

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Here are some quirky pro se claims, just to stimulate the noggin.

Defamation/litigation privilege/statute of limitations.  Ray v. Olender, No. 13-1834 (D.D.C. Nov. 21, 2013).  Judge Jackson dismissed an odd $5m pro se defamation claim against an attorney, apparently based on a 1965 suit for copyright infringement and counter-suit.  She held the claim barred by the one-year D.C. statute of limitations and, anyway, based on statements in pleadings, protected by the litigation privilege.

Copyright/infringement.  Buchanan v. Sony Music Ent., No. 18-cv-3028 (D.D.C. May 26, 2020).  In a wide-ranging complaint, pro se plaintiff accused defendant music producers of stealing from songs he submitted for consideration.  Dismissed, because three of four songs were not registered; plaintiff could not show that any producer actually received a copy of the fourth song demo tape; and plaintiff anyway failed to allege substantial similarity, beyond allegation of "steal[ing]," between defendants' hits and the plaintiff's "I Gos Ta Roll." 

Copyright/pleading.  Butler v. Cal. St. Disbursement Unit, No. 13-1684 (D.D.C. Oct. 23, 2013).  Pro se plaintiff accused the state of copyright infringement for using his name in all capital letters.  Dismissed for failure to plead adequately.  BUTLER.

Copyright/subject-matter jurisdiction.  Miller v. Library of Congress, No. 1:18-cv-02144 (D.D.C. Nov. 5, 2018).  Judge Jackson dismissed for lack of subject matter jurisdiction a $100m pro se copyright infringement claim by an author of "a book of songs" who alleged that the Library of Congress stole the book and allowed it to be used by others.  Held, he should have filed in the Federal Claims Court.  I'd return the book, but the fines....

FTCA/FOIA, civil rights.  Cofield v. United States, 64 F. Supp. 3d 206 (D.D.C. 2014).  A Maryland prisoner, pro se plaintiff sought billions in damages against ICANN and the Obama Administration for improper FOIA denials and race discrimination.  On the latter count, the plaintiff essentially accused the government of establishing a business monopoly in ICANN that leaves African-American persons "intentionally omitted, to be left behind when it comes to technology ... by design[.]"  An intriguing idea, but not the best spokesperson.  The court dismissed for sovereign immunity, as the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) authorizes neither FOIA complaints, which do not entitle a plaintiff to tort damages, nor constitutional claims.

Defendant-Justice Scalia (Shawn CC BY-NC 2.0)
Legal profession/sovereign immunity, absolute immunity.  Smith v. Scalia, 44 F. Supp. 3d 28 (D.D.C. 2014).  Yup, that Scalia.  The pro se plaintiff was denied admission to the Colorado Bar after "refus[ing] to submit to a mental status examination," and then sued officials, including judges who denied his appeals.  Even the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which rated among plaintiff's theories, cannot overcome federal sovereign and judicial absolute immunities, Judge Jackson held.  She declined to order Rule 11 sanctions, but did hit the frequent-filing plaintiff with a pre-filing injunction, going forward.
Maoz Falafel, Paris
(Björn Söderqvist CC BY-SA 2.0)

⚖️


Finally, I don't really care what happened in this case; I just love its name: A Love of Food I v. Maoz Vegetarian USA (D.D.C. 2014).  Plaintiff Love of Food was "a franchise of Maoz's vegetarian quick service restaurant" in D.C.  When the business failed, Love of Food blamed Maoz.  Maoz had failed to register its offering prospectus properly with the state of Maryland, but, Judge Jackson held, that omission did not give Love of Food standing.  The court issued mixed results on the, uh, meatier claims of misrepresentation, finding a material dispute of fact over the veracity of startup estimates.

Just wait 'til Big Meat hears about this.

I gos ta roll.

Thursday, September 30, 2021

Public-domain materials take legal education by storm; law librarians trace history from casebooks to 'OERs'

OER Is Sharing by Giulia Forsythe (CC0 1.0)
Law librarians Emma Wood and Misty Peltz-Steele, my brilliant colleagues (and 50% my spouse), have published Open Your Casebooks Please: Identifying Alternatives to Langdell's Legacy.

The work discusses the revolutionary contemporary movement of open-educational resources (OERs), a term, I learned, coined by UNESCO in 2002, particularly in legal education.  Here is the abstract:

Nonprofits, academic institutions, and educators have collaborated, at all academic levels, to create quality Open Educational Resources (OERs) since that term was defined by UNESCO in 2002. These open-source educational materials are in the public domain and published under an open license, meaning that they can be freely copied, used, adapted, and re-shared with the public. They include not only textbooks but supplemental educational materials in various media formats. Their value is such that even federal and state legislatures are taking note and passing laws to incentivize the creation and use of OER in both secondary and higher education. Despite the momentum in academics toward the adoption of open textbooks and supplemental materials, legal academia has been slower to embrace open casebooks. By design, OER offers a great deal of flexibility for educators and the promise of cost savings for academic institutions and students. This paper examines the modern history of casebooks and the OER movement, as well as the various OER platforms ideally suited to create open content for law courses. The authors posit that a greater understanding of OER will give law professors and students a wider range of choice and ownership in course materials.

When I joined my first casebook, published in 2006, it was still important to attach one's project to a prominent publisher, for the purpose of enhancing one's CV and bolstering the tenure-and-promotion application.  Thankfully, legal academia has started to recognize the needlessness of conventional publishing as a gatekeeper for legal educational materials.  The analysis was hastened by student sticker shock at textbook prices, which, I can attest, do not relieve authors of our day jobs.  I myself am, mercifully, no longer at a point in my career at which I need to impress anyone.  So I'm teaching Torts this year with "Tortz," my own OER in progress, at no additional charge to students.

The Wood & Peltz-Steele article will appear in 43 Western New England Law Review (2021).

Thursday, September 2, 2021

SDNY rules against Locast, knifes beleaguered free TV

[UPDATE: At 9:47 a.m. today, Thursday, Sept. 2, I received word that Locast is suspending operations, effective immediately.]  

Locast, an online retransmitter of broadcast television, and the American public together suffered a major blow on August 31, as the federal district court in New York handed partial summary judgment to ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC in the networks' copyright infringement lawsuit.

Locast has irritated me, but only for not expanding fast enough.  Where I live, near Providence, R.I., the service is not available.  It is available in New York to the south and Boston to the north, but access is strictly geo-fenced.  As a result, my family cannot see free broadcast TV without springing for an expensive subscription to a cable service or streaming-channel consolidator.

That's not really Locast's fault.  Broadcasters have reduced their power over the years, making free TV incrementally more difficult to access.  I live just nine miles from the broadcast towers that serve the Rhode Island state capital, but I cannot receive any signal with an interior or window-mounted antenna.

Indeed, the networks seem to want out of the broadcast game altogether.  Kickbacks from online consolidators such as Hulu Live and YouTube TV, and the networks' profits from their own services, such as Paramount+ (and Hulu Live, in part), are more lucrative than broadcasting and come with no FCC regulatory strings attached.  Local affiliates, including vital broadcast news outlets, fall through the cracks, wreaking further havoc in our information market, but that's no matter to the bottom line.  Locast threatened to breathe life back into the corpse of free TV, so the networks pursued the service with a vengeance. 

Locast is a non-profit, and its "business" model is simple.  It sets up a technology hub in a place such as Boston and converts local broadcast signals to online streams.  Home cord-cutters thus have their access to free TV restored through the internet service they already have, no antenna needed.

On the face of it, of course, this business model would constitute copyright infringement for copying and redistributing the broadcast signals.  But Congress, in a rare showing of commitment to the public interest rather than to the profit margins of our corporate overlords, built an exemption into the Copyright Act.  Governmental or nonprofit organizations are permitted to retransmit "without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage, and without charge to the recipients of the secondary transmission other than assessments necessary to defray the actual and reasonable costs of maintaining and operating the secondary transmission service."

Locast is freely available and supported only by voluntary donations.  But streaming is interrupted at 15-minute intervals by 15-second pleas for donations.  Like the ad-free versions of pay-TV services, Locast offers absolution from these interruptions in exchange for a minimum "donation" of $5 per month.  The $5-donation model proved sufficiently successful that Locast was able to cover its operating costs and use the excess to expand to new markets.

And that, expansion, was Locast's sin, in the eyes of the district court.  Judge Louis L. Stanton opined that Congress could have written "maintaining and operating and expanding" into the statutory exemption, but did not.  So Locast's dedication of additional accounts received to expansion was fatal to its claim of copyright exemption.

I find the court's reading of the statute exceedingly cramped.  Locast plainly is spending money to do precisely what Congress intended: making free TV available to people who cannot receive it without hiring a contractor to install an antenna tower.  That the books must balance within each micro-market rather than across live markets, in the utter absence of evidence that a dime has been diverted to any other objective, absurdly splits hairs.

Locast lawyers, joined by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, say they are examining the ruling.  Locast announced yesterday that it is for now ceasing streaming interruptions requesting donations. 

There are ways that Locast can work around its current predicament, I reason. Locast has been supported by some major corporate donors who are not old-school TV insiders, such as AT&T, which contributed $500,000.  Internet service providers such as AT&T benefit from Locast, because retransmissions are streamed into homes, rather than broadcast.  With more careful balancing of the books, it should be possible, if cumbersome, to parse operations between discrete markets and to raise capital to support expansion directly.

It's a shame that such gamesmanship should be required for what is clearly a public service.  And a bigger problem might remain for American information and entertainment consumers in the ongoing, if prolonged, death throes of free TV.  We might hope that Congress would obviate the fray with bold measures that would reinvigorate the landscape of electronic expression by enhancing public-interest limitations on digital intellectual property and guaranteeing access to the internet for all Americans.

We also might hope to see pigs take flight.

The case is American Broadcasting Cos. v. Goodfriend, No. 1:19-cv-07136 (S.D.N.Y. Aug. 31, 2021). I bet Judge Stanton is one of those people who has both cable and Fubo and can't use either one unless someone helps him with the remote.

Friday, April 23, 2021

Publishers put the '©' in World Book Day

The 1885 John Ormsby translation of Cervantes's Don Quijote,
with 1880 illustrations by Gustave Doré, are in the public domain
at Project Gutenberg.

Today, April 23, is the International Day of the Book, or "World Book and Copyright Day," a recognition organized by UNESCO since 1995.  The date was chosen to coincide with the date of death of Miguel de Cervantes, though that date in truth is only an estimate.

Some of the promotional material from UNESCO refers only to "World Book Day," and I've found no clear record of how copyright became attached.  Cervantes was gone for a century by the time the British Statute of Anne came on the scene in 1710.  In fairness to publishers, copyright did contribute to making authorship and printing commercially viable, so it deserves credit for promoting creativity and literacy.  (Read more about the history of copyright and later developments.)

But the skeptic in me suspects that "copyright" as part of our international day of recognition came about at the behest of an industry, which, today, overreaches.  When, ancillary to civil rights-era constitutional activism, the U.S. Supreme Court found some room for the First Amendment to operate even as against the copyright clause of the 1789 Constitution, the publishers took the lead in drafting ungenerous "fair use guidelines," limits on copyright carve-out, that too often are regarded as law, especially by administrators in academia.

Lately, my wife, a librarian, and I have been troubled by the terms imposed on our local library, and all libraries, for the use of electronic books.  Once upon a time in the analog world, a library could lend a book as many times as the book could physically sustain.  Even then, the library could rebind the book and give it a new lending life.  After a single purchase, a book could reach new readers for centuries, well beyond its copyright.

1880 Doré illustration of the Adventure of the Windmills
No longer.  Publishers now self-servingly "estimate" the shelf-life equivalent of an electronic book and permit libraries to lend the book only so many times, say, 52 loans or two years, whichever comes first.  Then poof, the e-book turns into a pumpkin, and the library has to pay for a new e-book again.  Be careful about putting your name to a library service that automatically checks out an e-book to you when it becomes available, but you can then pass it on if you're not ready to read it.  The access apps are supported by publishers, and your pass counts as a full check-out against the license limit.  Our local libraries cannot afford this turnover.  Only time will tell what damage we inflict on public access, collective memory, and incentives to create, not to mention global equity in the distribution of knowledge, when we have fully turned books into inalienable commodities.

If you spare two thoughts for "World Book and Copyright Day," let one be about how you can push back against copyright restrictions so that books, including their electronic equivalents, can be, and forever remain, accessible to all.  That's no windmill.