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Nice writeup of Center for Internet and Society's fair use win in NY State Court

By Georgia Harper

The Bridgeport decision -- the one that famously proclaimed that there was no such thing as a de minimus use of music recordings (ie, no matter *how small* your use, it needs to be licensed) got some comeuppance yesterday: New York Supreme Court Rejects EMI's Bid to Enjoin Expelled | Stanford Center for Internet and Society. The context was Yoko Ono's and EMI Records' claims against the showing of "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," a film that uses some clips from John Lennon's "Imagine," without permission. I blogged about this when it first came to light. Ono quickly lost her bid for an injunction based on ownership of the composition, and now EMI has lost its similar bid based on its ownership of the recording copyright. These holdings are excellent news for creative fair use, of course, but the rejection in the NY Supreme Court's analysis of the Bridgeport case reasoning is icing on the cake! Maybe we will begin to see some relief from ridiculous cases holding that 3 notes from or a few seconds of someone's song is an infringement. Such a reversal of the trend for which, hopefully, Bridgeport represents the high water mark, would be welcomed by the creators of new works who increasingly base their works on or incorporate snippets from others' works. From what I've read, Lessig's last book on copyright (Remix -- coming out in October) deals with this kind of creativity and the important role that fair use must play if we are to have a law that makes any sense at all in the digital networked environment we live in today.

Full post as published by ©ollectanea on August 14, 2008 (boomark / email).