How can New Media Rights help you?

New Media Rights answers questions from the public and takes media inquiries regarding the law and technology.  Please contact us if you have a question and we'll be glad to assist you. Our free legal and how-to resources, as well as our free public media studio and equipment, are supported by donations by individuals like you, so please consider donating today! Contact us for legal assistance at (619) 591-8870.

Fair Use

Mera Szendro Bok's picture

“Remixing Popular Culture: Subverting Gender and Sexuality with Remix Video”

Submitted by Mera Szendro Bok on Wed, 08/11/2010 - 10:48

Julie Levin Russo (Stanford) and Alexis Lothian (USC) as well as Jonathan McIntosh, creator of Buffy vs Edward talk about the power of remix videos and challenging people's perception of sexuality and gender. The event was hosted by Anita Sarkeesian (FeministFrequency.com)

»

Copyright Office decision supports cell phone jailbreaking, encourages educators and remixers

Submitted by Shaun Spalding on Thu, 07/29/2010 - 14:14

Regardless of how one feels about the Digital Millenium Copyrighti Act (DMCAi) as a whole, it’s clear that the Copyright Office's recent rulemaking process has appropriately further limited the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision. In February 2009, New Media Rights submitted comments in support of these changes that have now been enacted.

The Office's ruling attempted to clarify the DMCA's prohibition on “circumventing” digital rights management (DRMi) and “other technical protection measures” -- a prohibition that, up until now, has given Apple the theoretical right to intimidate iPhonei users with “jailbroken” phones with legal action. The Office ruled that this jailbreaking does not constitute violation of the DMCA. Although Apple has never prosecuted any iPhone jailbreaker under the DMCA, Apple did strongly object to any exemption to the anti-circumvention rule. This has led many general interest news sources to label these recent exemptions as a victory specific to iPhone jailbreakers which isn’t true.  The victory is a broader one, for cell phone users, video remix artists, documentarians, and educators, among others.

»

Let the Wookie Win: A Short History of Star Wars Litigation

Submitted by Shaun Spalding on Tue, 07/20/2010 - 11:34

San Diego Comic Con has arrived again! Although New Media Rights provides assistance to creators and internet users nationally, we are firmly rooted in San Diego and supporting local San Diego arts and culture.

Every year, Comic Con brings Storm Troopers fraternizing with Bounty Hunters back to downtown San Diego, and grown women huddled up in Tauntaun sleeping bags back to the Convention Center’s hallways.

To celebrate Star Wars Day and Comic Con returning to San Diego, and to prove learning about the law can be fun (sometimes), we present to you a short history of Star Wars trademark litigation: two cases in which Lucasfilm took people to court over Star Wars and lost.

»

Bros Icing Bros - A Case for Copyright Bullying by Overreacting Smirnoff Lawyers

Submitted by Shaun Spalding on Mon, 06/21/2010 - 17:26

"Smirnoff Ice" by Fernando Ariotti (Released Under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic )

On the morning of July 16, my bros on Twitteri noticed something totally un-chill: BrosIcingBros.com, the epicenter of the icing phenomenon, had been taken down. Instead of user-submitted photos of young brosephs and bro-ettes, on their knees drinking bottles of Smirnoff Ice, the website displayed an unceremonious, one-sentence farewell: "We had a good run Bros..."

At NewMediaRights, our pro-bono IPi attorney Art Neill regularly deals with individuals being bullied by large copyright/trademark owners into taking down their sites, even when those sites don't actually violate copyright and trademark law. To bring this practice to light, we wanted to publicly discuss how strong/weak Smirnoff's legal arguments to take down BrosIcingBros.com really are, and whether Smirnoff had good faith when chose to take the site down.

By the end of our analysis, we’ll conclude that

(A) Smirnoff’s arguments for both copyright and trademark infringement are weak at best;

(B) Even though Smirnoff did have good faith to send a cease and desist letter to BrosIcingBros for some instances of infringement, it was not within reason for Smirnoff to require that the entire site to get taken down.

(C) If BrosIcingBros was, in fact, taken down because of legal problems with Smirnoff, then this is a classic example of a large brand’s legal department overreaching with cease and desist letters and bullying individuals into compliance without sufficient legal arguments to back their claims up.

»
Mera Szendro Bok's picture

Art and the Significance of Remix Culture video

Submitted by Mera Szendro Bok on Fri, 05/14/2010 - 10:12

Watch DJs, artists, writers, musicians and lawyers talk about the significance of remix in their work and the long-time tradition of re-use in creative culture.

»
art neill's picture

Respecting the linking economy and information aggregators - part 1 of 3 online rights battles that need fighting this decade

Submitted by art neill on Sat, 04/17/2010 - 09:52

"Rainbow" shared by Jakrome under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0Intuitively, if you use the Internet even sparingly as a means of connecting you to the broader world, you'll recognize that much of the activity that takes place on the internet involves humans (and automated search engines and other services) filtering and aggregating basic facts and information.  This is so fundamental to our daily Internet use it largely goes unnoticed.  A link from search engine, a tweet, or a status update from a social media service are just a few examples.  There is huge value in helping citizens sift through the wonderful oversaturation of information the Internet offers.

There are, however, real threats to our ability to find content and navigate in our vast information ocean.  This very cornerstone of the Internet is threatened by fear, misunderstanding, and overreaching from some traditional content owners.

»

Legal and How-to Guides for Citizen Media Creators and Online Publishing

Webtreats Glowing Neon Social Medi Icons by Flikr user webtreats used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license

New Media Rights Guides are available to browse, read and learn from. They are organized by category and title.

New Media Rights Guides are available to browse, read and learn from. They are organized by category and title.

Webtreats Glowing Neon Social Media Icons by Flickr user webtreats used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license

»

Best Practices for Creative Commons attributions - how to attribute works you reuse under a Creative Commons license

Submitted by New Media Rights on Fri, 12/11/2009 - 13:49

Find out how to site or source creative commons work. Creative commons work allows you to share, remix and reuse legally, just make sure to check out what license it is under.

“creative commons” by Flikr user libraryman used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license

»

A New Leistungsschutzrecht? Say It's Nicht So!

Submitted by New Media Rights on Fri, 10/30/2009 - 11:05

It's tough being a publisher these days.  Of course, no one is having much fun in the current economic downturn, but publishers were up against it even before the slowdown.  Circulations have been down across the board for years now, which in turn has slashed the advertising revenues that print publications have always relied upon to survive.  It's just a bad time to be publishing newspapers and magazines, at least while using the classical publishing business model.

»

RIAA Asks Schoolkids To Assist With Propaganda

Last week, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced an update to Music-Rules!, its flagship "curriculum" for teaching copyright law to schoolkids.

»
Syndicate content