New Media Rights will be at the REC Innovation Lab at San Diego Miramar College this week! Assistant Director Erika Lee and Student Fellow Jackie Taitano-Johnson will be speaking about copyright, contracts and other legal considerations that startups should be thinking about. We'll be focusing on common areas where it can be easy to make mistakes, and talk about ways that you can prevent some of these common missteps early on. We'll also talk about moments where it's probably time to reach out to a lawyer along the way. 

This presentation is made possible with support from the City of San Diego Economic Development Department. READ MORE

New Media Rights recently received a $20,000 grant from Grant for the Web to support Grant for the Web recipients and others on the boundaries of web monetization with legal services. This grant is a continuation of our work with web monetization innovators last year, and we are thrilled to be continuing our work with the Grant for the Web community! The grant is a partnership with Grant for the Web, a program supported by the Mozilla Foundation, Creative Commons, and Coil. Grant for the Web believes that a healthy internet needs openness and opportunity, and that it cannot be built on the backs of individuals’ security and privacy. The funds are intended to support an ecosystem that will challenge the web’s most urgent issues: loss of privacy, centralization of power, and inequalities in online participation. READ MORE

Every three years the Copyright Office meets to reconsider exemptions to the DMCA Anti-Circumvention provisions. These exemptions are critical to ensuring creators and consumers’ ability to bypass technological protection measures on copyrighted works, allowing them to make fair use of works in a variety of circumstances.  Continuing our participation every since 2009, NMR staff and California Western law students submitted worked on behalf of creators and consumers to maintain three key exemptions. These exemptions help ensure that documentary filmmakers and noncommercial video creators can access materials in fair use for their work, and that consumers can install the apps and software of their choice on their smartphones.

On October 27, 2021 the Copyright Office revealed the results of their 2021 Anti-Circumvention Rulemaking. All three of the exemptions NMR petitioned to renew have been renewed, and we are cited 8 times in the new recommendation.

In a scholarly article, recently published in the University of Texas Intellectual Property Law Journal (Vol. 28, No. 1, p. 87-98, 2019), New Media Rights' Executive Director Art Neill and Staff Attorney Erika Lee consider some options for modernizing copyright registration. The Texas Intellectual Property law Journal is a top 15 ranked Intellectual Property Journal according to Washington & Lee's rankings. 

The article, Fixing Copyright Registration For Online Video Creators: The Case for Group Registration of Published Videos, considers the history of published group registration since the Copyright Act of 1976 and argues that future modernization efforts should include group registration of video. The article also posits that current options for registering videos are ineffective and cost-prohibitive for online video creators, and proposes opening a rulemaking with the Copyright Office to establish group registration of published videos (which is currently not permitted). READ MORE