Copyright Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Joshua D. Waterston, Esq.

Star Trek Copyright – Where No Court Has Gone Before

Joshua D. Waterston, Esq.2020-09-30T09:57:45-04:00August 31st, 2020|Copyright, Intellectual Property|

Two thousand years ago, the Roman historian Tacticus said that "victory is claimed by all, failure to one alone." Such is the fate of successful creative works, whether they are music, art, or television shows. In recent years, the Star Trek universe has expanded to include several new shows, including the successful "Star Trek: Discovery." Enter the copyright infringement lawsuits. Anas Abdin created a videogame over the course of several years between 2014 and 2017. The video game is set in 20,000 B.C., and focuses on characters living on a space station. In 2015, he created a character based upon [...Read More...]

Copyright Law Doesn’t “Heart” New York

Joshua D. Waterston, Esq.2021-08-24T10:31:12-04:00May 29th, 2020|Copyright, Intellectual Property, Trademark|

Why is the famous "I [heart] New York" logo protected by trademark and not copyright? At first glance, you'd think that it's artwork, and therefore can be protected by copyright. However, the Copyright Act protects "original works of authorship." The "I [heart] New York" logo is simply the phrase "I love New York", with the word "love" replaced by a red heart. As the Supreme Court held in Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., [t]he sine qua non of copyright is originality. To qualify for copyright protection, a work must be original to the author. … Original, as [...Read More...]

Post a Photograph to Social Media and License it to the World?

Joshua D. Waterston, Esq.2020-04-30T04:00:50-04:00April 30th, 2020|Contracts, Copyright, Intellectual Property|

Authors, beware! The next time you post your work on social media, you may lose significant ownership rights. A core principle of U.S. copyright law is that the author controls how their work is used, and can earn money from that use if they wish. But what happens when a photographer posts her work on Instagram and a large corporation uses it without compensating the photographer? This is exactly what happened to Stephanie Sinclair, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, who has been published in National Geographic and the New York Times Magazine. On September 22, 2015, Sinclair posted a photo to [...Read More...]

Have DMCA Takedowns Gone Rogue?

Joshua D. Waterston, Esq.2020-03-03T19:22:37-05:00March 3rd, 2020|Copyright, Intellectual Property|

In 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) became law. That year, Chumbawamba's "Tubthumping" topped the charts, Mark McGwire broke the home run record, Google, Inc. was formed, and smartphones didn't yet exist. The Web was in its infancy, but online service providers were concerned about their potential liability for hosting users' content. The DMCA added a new section 512 to the Copyright Act, limiting the liability for online service providers who hosted unmodified user content, adopted methods to terminate access to repeat copyright infringers, didn't interfere with copyright protection technology, and complied with copyright owners' requests to remove infringing material. This [...Read More...]

Google v. Oracle – the Supreme Court’s copyright case of the decade?

Joshua D. Waterston, Esq.2020-07-31T00:05:22-04:00January 30th, 2020|Copyright, Intellectual Property|

Photo by Mr. Kjetil Ree. [CC BY-SA] Newsweek has called it the "copyright case of the decade" and they may be right. Google and Oracle are software titans battling over whether the freely available connections between software platforms (Application Programming Interfaces, or "APIs") can be protected by copyright law. What's an API? APIs are bits of software code which enable developers to quickly and easily build programs that integrate with a specific platform or piece of software, saving the developer from needing to write the code for commonly-used functions. For example, both Android and iOS have APIs that enable [...Read More...]