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Reasonable Balance

Intellectual property issues as they relate to art and music, legal news of all kinds, and takes on popular music.
By Nancy Prager, Esq.

Post Frequency: 0.3/day

Last Entry: January 29, 2015 at 12:02:13

Conjuring a Ghost: Copyright and Rowling prevail in the Harry Potter Encyclopedia Case

Posted on September 11, 2008
Fair use, like obscenity, is something that judges in America seem to know when they see it. With the rise of the Internet, fair use seems to be becoming a more popular defense, and even an offense, in copyright infringement cases. What qualifies for fair use in one case, may likely not qualify in another [...

Creative Commons, contracts and copyright?

Posted on September 05, 2008
How many of you use a Creative Commons branded document to license your songs, text, art or photograph? <Nancy scans the crowd, sees many hands go up.> How many of you read anything other than this handy pictograph chart Creative Commons provides? <Scanning the crowd, only a few hands remain in the air...

Stop the Presses: Io Groups v. Veoh might not be a home run for YouTube

Posted on August 29, 2008
A purveyor of pornography, Io Groups, filed a copyright infringement action against Veoh Networks over the performance of clips from ten (10) of its movies on veoh.com. Similar to YouTube in many ways, users may upload content to veoh.com. Unlike YouTube, the site did not initially prohibit adult entertainment...

A supplement to the New York Times article on YouTube and its VideoID initiative

Posted on August 17, 2008
In “Some Media Companies Choose to Profit from Pirated YouTube Clips” the New York Times reports that content companies from Universal Music to Lionsgate Film have opted to participate in a program that allows user uploaded content to remain on YouTube with advertising revenue diverted to the owners of the content...

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You Asked, I?ll Tell: Does YouTube pay ASCAP a license fee?

Posted on August 13, 2008
A Reasonable Balance reader recently asked whether or not YouTube pays ASCAP for a license to perform music on its site. No, YouTube is not currently paying ASCAP, BMI or SESAC for the performance of music on its site. When last I checked, the performing rights organizations were each still trying to negotiate [...

Isaac Hayes? a great Memphis Soul

Posted on August 11, 2008
An amazing voice, writer and spirit was lost last night when Isaac Hayes passed away. Not only did he write amazing songs, from the theme of Shaft to Soul Man, he was dedicated to educating and mentoring younger musicians who followed in his footsteps...

Cablevision: a limited victory for the storage of content in the clouds?.

Posted on August 06, 2008
The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this week, in Cartoon Network v. Cablevision, held that the “Remote Storage Digital Video Recorder” (RS-DVR) service Cablevision offered did not infringe on the plaintiff content owner’s copyrights...

Google Book Search: Let There Be Light, free the public domain

Posted on August 05, 2008
I am constantly researching, either for client related projects or for my writing projects, including this blog. As a researcher I love being able to access most information I need on the Internet through public resources or proprietary databases. For the past few weeks I have been spending a great deal of time [...

On the occassion of William Patry?s retirement from the blogosphere

Posted on August 03, 2008
William Patry has retired his incredibly useful blog about copyright. Unfortunately, not only has he retired the blog he has removed all of its posts. His final post provides that the reason for the retirement is two fold. First, Mr. Patry is senior copyright counsel for Google...

Who knew? Not 14, but 5 years is the ideal copyright term.

Posted on July 24, 2008
In a move that one ups Larry Lessig’s call for a 14 year copyright term, Andrew Dubber, a professor in England, has announced to the world that the ideal copyright term for creative content is 5 years. Like Lessig, Dubber’s 5 year term would be renewable if the copyright creator has used the works [...

YouTube on TiVo: The future of broadcasting?

Posted on July 21, 2008
In the ongoing litigation between Viacom and YouTube, one of the significant factors that the court may have to consider is whether or not YouTube knew or should have known about the infringement occurring on its site. Well before the litigation, executives and agents of the company acknowledged that they were aware that the [...

Off Topic: Unfortunate Trademark Infringement

Posted on July 16, 2008
The media reported that the Columbian military had rescued FARC held hostages under the guise of being humanitarian volunteers. At the time I thought that was probably an unfortunate ruse for the dozens of hostages that FARC is still holding in the jungle...

Europe here we come! Music streams across borders?

Posted on July 16, 2008
Companies around the world that want to offer legal music services online have to jump through a series of hoops to obtain the rights required to broadcast music. In the United States, companies negotiate a rate with three different performing rights organizations for the right to perform the underlying compositions, and rely on [...

Quick & Dirty Post: Viacom agrees to let YouTube strip? data

Posted on July 15, 2008
Viacom and the other plaintiffs in the proceeding against YouTube for copyright infringement have agreed that YouTube may transfer the data discussed previously without the IP Addresses or other potentially personally identifiable information. So does that mean that IP Addresses alone are personally identifiable? If so, that contradicts testimony from a Google technologist who claimed [...

Quick & Dirty Post: Weeds, making it easy to get? music

Posted on July 11, 2008
One day you will be able to point your remote at your television, or click on your computer screen, to buy the song accompanying a scene. Heck, you might even be able to point your MP3 device at a movie screen, billboard or other potentially wireless emanating device and download the song...

Quick & Dirty Post: Weeds, making it easy to buy? music

The many layers of the discovery order in Viacom v. YouTube

Posted on July 08, 2008
There was a time twelve terabytes of data would require multiple mainframes to store and process it. Now, as the judge in the ongoing Viacom v. YouTube litigation has noted, there are affordable and fairly portable four terabyte hard drives available...

Oh, Mamma Mia, Sex and the City: a little bit about derivative works

Posted on July 02, 2008
The right to make a derivative work is one of the most valuable of the exclusive rights granted to the owner of a copyright. In the United States, reformulating preexisting copyright protected works for a new purpose, like a movie version of a book, creates a derivative work of the original work...

Some practical advice for rock stars in the Digital Age

Posted on June 16, 2008
Last week I co-sponsored the “Distributing and Marketing your Music on the Internet” panel at Artomatic with the Future of Music Coalition and the Washington Area Lawyers for the Arts. In lieu of a policy or legal discussion, the panelists offered practical advice to musicians and others interested in marketing and distributing music online...

Copyright is important, but other things much more so?

Posted on June 10, 2008
After an investigation during which millions of indecent and illegal pictures of children were viewed over the Internet, Andrew Cuomo, the Attorney General of the State of New York, has announced that three of the major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have agreed to block access to child pornography...

Fundamentals of Copyright and the Problem with Lost Owners: unintended consequences (Part Two)

Posted on May 27, 2008
As discussed in The Fundamentals of Copyright and the Problem with Lost Owners (Part One) the exclusive rights of copyright attach automatically to a work, whether a photograph or a poem, once it has been transposed into tangible form. However, for works created before 1978, authors and artists had to take affirmative steps to [...

Artful Law at Artomatic? tonight at 6:30 p.m.

Posted on May 22, 2008
Yes, tonight, May 22, at 6:30 p.m. I am moderating and participating on the Artful Law panel at Artomatic. I have been remiss in posting it on my own blog. Oops. Artomatic 2008 1200 1st St. NE Washington DC New York Ave. Metro (red line) Topics will include everything from choice of entity, tax issues and licensing...

Fundamentals of copyright, lost owners and audience participation

Posted on May 20, 2008
Many people find the comparison of real property to intellectual property disconcerting or inappropriate. The arguments I have heard include “one is tangible, the other is intangible” or ” a finite number of people can use one, while millions of people can use the other...

Music 2.0?> what are your ideas?

Posted on May 15, 2008
The wonderful and informative blog Hypebot is holding an online roundtable to address how the business of being a musician is going to change as a result of the disruptive technologies that the Digital Age has introduced. Bruce Houghton has posted his Top 10 Issues Facing Music 2...

Off Topic: Hezbollah and Lebanon go to war? over the telephone

Posted on May 11, 2008
Last week, the Lebanese cabinet debated eleven hours to decide what to do about the private telecommunications network Hezbollah has installed along the borders with Israel. Declaring it illegal and a threat to security, they ordered Hezbollah to remove the landline network...

No? Really. We might actually be held responsible?

Posted on May 09, 2008
Right about now, Valence Media and its co-defendants might wish that TorrentSpy was the name of a blockbuster movie they had produced instead of the peer to peer network that served as a means for the wholesale illegal distribution of the creative works of others...

What I should have said?

Posted on May 07, 2008
Have you ever felt like you missed an opportunity to say something? Of course you have, we all have. Recently, I missed the opportunity to participate in an essay contest for the Yale Journal of Law and Technology in which participants were asked to advise the next administration on technology and intellectual property policy...

Uh oh, here we go again?

Posted on May 01, 2008
In what may be a historic decision, Judge William Conner of the Southern District Court of New York (”SDNY) has set a rate for the blanket licenses of the songs in the American Society of Composers and Publishers (”ASCAP”) catalog to AOL, Yahoo, and RealNetworks (operator of Rhapsody and other music services)...

Ingrid Michaelson: Building an (independent) career one (great) song at a time

Posted on April 15, 2008
Ingrid Michaelson is a very talented singer/songwriter as is evident on her two indie releases, Girls & Boys and Slow the Rain. Like other artists she set up a MySpace account to share her music and build an audience. One day in the fall of 2006, Lynn Grossman, a music supervisor/artist [...

Network Neutrality, a reasonable approach

Posted on April 14, 2008
Generally I have been fairly ambivalent about Network Neutrality. The response to my blog post about Damian Kulash’s editorial in the New York Times has caused me to reconsider the issue. Friends and colleagues reached out to explain why I should support the concept of Network Neutrality: arguments were made, economic analysis provided [...

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