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Copyright and Speech Should Be Treated Like Traffic Tickets While there may not be consensus on what they are, there is a shared belief that U.S. copyright law has some serious problems. But the CASE Act, which aims to treat copyright claims like traffic tickets, is not the answer. On Thursday, August 27, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the CASE Act (H.R. 3945). The CASE Act would create a “small claims” system for copyright, but not within the courts. Instead, cases would be heard by “Claims Officers” at the Copyright Office in Washington, D.C. And the Copyright Office has a history of presuming the interests of copyright holders are more valid than other legal rights and policy concerns, including the free expression values protected by fair use. Basically every concern we had about the CASE Act last year remains: Turning over quasi-judicial power, which would include issuing damages awards of up to $15,000 per work infringed or $30,000 per proceeding, and agre...

Egypt Sentences Tourist to Eight Years Jail for Complaining about Vacation Online When she went to Egypt for vacation, Mona el-Mazbouh surely didn’t expect to end up in prison. But after the 24-year-old Lebanese tourist posted a video in which she complained of sexual harassment—calling Egypt a lowly, dirty country and its citizens “pimps and prostitutes”—el-Mazbouh was arrested at Cairo’s airport and found guilty of deliberately spreading false rumors that would harm society, attacking religion, and public indecency. She was sentenced to eight years in prison. The video that el-Mazbouh posted was ten minutes long, and went viral on Facebook, causing an uproar in Egypt. In the video, el-Mazbouh also expressed anger about poor restaurant service during Ramadan and complained of her belongings being stolen. Egyptian men and women posted videos in response to her original video, prompting el-Mazbouh to delete the original video and post a second video on Facebook apologizing to E...

CLASSICS Is the Future of Assaults Against the Public Domain January 1, 2019 will be the first time in twenty years that works in the United States will once again join the public domain through copyright expiration . A growing public domain means more access to works and the ability of other artists to build on what came before. And as we get closer and closer to finally growing the public domain, big content holders are going to push harder and harder to lock it all down again. CLASSICS is the first step in that direction. CLASSICS is a very bad bill that has been bundled with the largely-good Music Modernization Act (MMA). That bundle was passed in the House of Representatives and is currently sitting in the Senate . The original text of MMA created a new way to compensate songwriters and publishers for music played on digital services. CLASSICS, on the other hand, took advantage of a messy and confusing situation—not unusual in copyright—in order to let labels find new ways...