CIA memo from 1948 on copyright in photographs and whether the agency should be taking a license or fair use applies. Source: web.archive.org/web/20250227...
@zvirosen
Associate Professor, UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law Copyright & Trademark Law (especially but not exclusively history), plus bankruptcy/business law and property. Among other things, but that's probably what I'm here for.
CIA memo from 1948 on copyright in photographs and whether the agency should be taking a license or fair use applies. Source: web.archive.org/web/20250227...
The video of this event is available here. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDfO...
You probably know this, but the record of one of the major Colt patent cases is available: catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/01039...
but that's not so hard to do by hand and a macro in Word might be possible to further reduce the workload (although keeping it straight from abbreviations may be a challenge). Of course either way human review is still needed.
...but asking Claude then to format it as markup and pasting the markup into Google Docs did the trick. Obviously this is a bit of a niche use but if you're looking to republish an older article this is extremely helpful. Only remaining issue is small caps weren't recognized...
Figured out a bit of a white whale for me - converting a pre-digital document to formatted DOCX with footnotes properly linked. Uploaded the Heinonline PDF, and Claude was able to OCR and properly format it pretty readily to HTML, but the resulting HTML footnotes wouldn't convert into Word or Docs
Uploaded an interesting study I haven't seen before - the Applicability of the Universal Copyright Convention to works in PD in their home country - US Copyright Office Study from 1979 or so. archive.org/details/appl...
At 4 PM eastern today I'll be participating in a webinar on codes and copyright with @emilysbremer.bsky.social and Hon. Stephen Vaden - specifically the 3rd Circuit's pending decision in ASTM v. Upcodes - join us! fedsoc.org/events/no-on...
For the 50th anniversary year of the 1976 Copyright Act I've resumed uploading stuff digitized at the US Copyright Office to my YouTube page (which is mostly old copyright stuff). Here's a workshop on the publishing industry in 12 parts from 1982-3: www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYoK...
Thank you!
I realize although I put it on some other socials I didn't announce this here yet. Excited to be the new Faculty Director at the UNH Franklin Pierce Center for IP. law.unh.edu/blog/2026/01...
Early bird pricing for IPPI's 2026 Winter Institute goes through this coming Wednesday, January 14!
Check out the conference website for more details: blogs.uakron.edu/ualawip/even...
#IPLaw #IP #Innovation #Patent #Copyright #IPPI2026
The Copyright Office Shareware Registry is such a curio. It's still in the Copyright Office regs and compendium even though it's pretty much a defunct model afaik. Here's the reg creating it: cdn.loc.gov/copyright/hi...
P.S. See some of you in New Orleans soon!
The whole book seems interesting to copyright folks, this chapter especially.
Nice video about "trademark infringement" restaurants including the original Burger King in Mattoon: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar-l...
Nice collection of Copyright Office pamphlets of the current copyright law of the United States published 1898-2003 on @hathitrust.bsky.social : catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/00391...
See discussion here at 12-16: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
There was a book "Who Owns Scholarly Work" looking into this a bit ago. There was also an attempt to argue that publishers lacked standing to sue over textbook copying because they lacked ownership of works by professors.
IMO there's a lot less clarity here than one might hope for.
Published that same year in the US Copyright Office Examining Division Annual Report as "The Shape of Copyright To Come" - archive.org/details/USCO...
I joined a Hudson Institute webinar to discuss the Supreme Court's argument in Sony v. Cox - you can watch here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVFy...
Interesting. What platform would I design such a tool for? This is where not being a coder shows :)
Is there a tool to automatically create redlines showing proposed changes in statutes from the XML of proposed bills on Congress dot gov? I tried using Claude and ChatGPT and both either failed or hallucinated (or both!)
Some new editions to my shelf! Includes treatises by Drone, Amdur, & Weil, Bowker's book Copyright: Its History & Law, a 1968 edition of Nimmer, and more. Copinger and MacGillivray treatises need a rebind.
Tomorrow at 11:00 AM ET: I'm excited to be discussing the Cox v. Sony oral argument with my favorite #copyright geek @zvirosen.bsky.social at the "Courthouse Steps" webinar hosted by the Federalist Society. I hope you can join us!
Register here: fedsoc.org/events/court...
See, also, rankings of ISPs from 1997, treating ISP as a different category from portals like AOL: web.archive.org/web/19970802...
It's not true though! There were plenty of conduit ISPs in 1998 and indeed much earlier. Admittedly AOL was still the biggest game in town but for instance AT&T Worldnet had a million subscribers in 1998. Source: www.zdnet.com/article/what...
When I teach Napster and Grokster, I often encourage students to watch Bloomberg's System Shock documentary - it's available on YouTube in 3 parts here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHVR...
Interesting video from Dave Hurwitz about some of the challenges of copyright on YouTube - specifically automated claiming and dealing with actual permissions in classical Music. www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4wz...
Very cool online event this Thursday!