Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Music sampling has suffered a strange fate at the hands of copyright law. It should fare well under the fair use doctrine. In general, it's very transformative, uses small amounts of the copyrighted work, and there exists little possibility that the new work would serve as any plausible substitute for the old. Yet there are precious few cases that even address the application of fair use to music sampling.

I'm afraid much of this is due to the refusal of music publishers, record labels -- and even artists -- to raise the defense in the first place. A case in point: The Sixth Circuit's recent decision in Bridgeport Music v. Justin Combs Publishing, which affirmed copyright infringement liability against the defendants, including Bad Boy Records, the label founded and still headed by CEO Sean "Diddy" Combs. (The opinion also reversed an absurd punitive damage award. Read a full copy of the decision here.)

Plaintiff William V. Aguiar III, sued documentary filmmaker Floyd Webb, alleging that Webb's promotional website and film trailer for his upcoming film infringe on copyrights and trademarks that Aguiar claims to own. Webb's film, "The Search for Count Dante," will chronicle the real-life odyssey of martial arts master John Keehan, a.k.a. Count Juan Raphael Dante -- "The Crown Prince of Death."

All too often, copyright is viewed in strcitly economic terms, as if it does no more than determine who pays what to whom, and when. In his editorial in today's LA Times, Kembrew McLeod reminds us that copyright enforcement and the scope of fair use rights also have profound free speech implications. Read it here.

The Tenth Circuit handed us a momentous victory today, holding that the Uruguay Round Agreements Act ("URAA") altered the "traditional contours of copyright protection" by resurrecting copyright protection for works that had fallen into the public domain, thus contravening the "bedrock principle of copyright law that works in the public domain remain in the public domain."

While this decision does not invalidate the URAA, it does hold that the URAA must pass either strict or intermediate First Amendment scrutiny on remand.

Read the full decision here.

It's almost midnight here on the east coast, but I'm wide awake -- happily -- because I have some truly *great* news to report. The 10th Circuit just handed down its ruling in the appeal of Golan v. Gonzales. And we have won! The First Amendment lives! (at least in the 10th Circuit).

The briefing on BT's motion for attorneys' fees is now complete.

It didn't take long for Director / Producer Jason Kohn to find success. His very first film, Manda Bala, won both the Grand Jury Prize and top honors for cinematography at Sundance this year. It's a superbly-composed and riveting look at kidnapping and corruption in Brazil.

Manda Bala makes its theatrical debut this Friday, August 17 at the Angelika Film Center in New York, with nationwide release to follow this Fall. Details here. We are proud to have helped Jason on this film, and thrilled that you can now experience it too. More about the film here.