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Hollywood Nervous About Kagan's Fair Use Views
Of the many commentaries and analyses springing up about Obama's Supreme Court nominee, this community might be most interested in one from the Hollywood Reporter. Reader Hugh Pickens notes that Hollywood may have reason to be nervous about the nomination of Elena Kagan to be the next US Supreme Court justice. "As dean of Harvard Law School from 2003 to 2009, Kagan was instrumental in beefing up the school's Berkman Center for Internet & Society by recruiting Lawrence Lessig and others who take a strongly liberal position on fair use in copyright disputes. And Kagan got an opportunity to showcase her feelings on intellectual property when the US Supreme Court asked her, as US Solicitor General, to weigh in on the big Cablevision case. 'After Cablevision announced in 2006 that it would allow subscribers to store TV programs on the cable operator's computer servers instead of on a hard-top box, Hollywood studios went nuts, predicting that the days of licensing on-demand content would be over,' writes Gardner. Kagan's brief compared remote-storage DVRs to VCRs (PDF), brought up the Sony/Betamax case, and lightly slapped Cablevision on the wrist for not making fair use a bigger issue. 'It sounds to us like Kagan would love the Court to determine when customers have a fair-use right to copy, which should cheer those on the copy-left at the EFF, and worry many in the entertainment industry.' On the minus side, Kagan has surrounded herself with entertainment industry advocates in the Justice Department."
I hope they're nervous. They need a little "fear" to keep them honest (or at least as honest as they can be considering they are the some of the greediest bastards on earth).
Looks like both Dem's & Rep's aren't exactly thrilled with everything Elena Kagan stands for. It always sounds like a good choice when neither side is happy with the possibilities.
technology changes law. technology does not fit into the confines as defined by law, law adjusts and accommodates to new technology
and when law pits itself against technology, law always loses. technological progress has destroyed and swept aside so many legal, social, and political structures in this world
why does anyone believe hollywood stands a chance? the internet has permanently changed media distribution, in favor of the consumer. all that media companies can do is adapt, or die. of course, in the adaptation period, plenty of absurd attempts at preserving the legal status quos of past dead technological eras will be attempted, but this is just denial
in the end, we, the consumer, win. because technology empowers us to route around the old status quo. and if the law is pitted against the technology, then it also empowers us above the law (in this one narrow issue)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If she is nominated, Kagan will have to be recused from all the cases that she handled as Solicitor General of the United States. That could be a few dozen cases. The reason is that as Solicitor General, she does not have the power to come up with her own viewpoints; she represents the President's interests. This isn't an indication of what she thinks, but she's just the person in charge of arguing the President's position.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Of course it is. She's the Solicitor General.
But there's a big difference between when your job is to be the lawyer for the United States (in regard to SCOTUS at least) and when you are actually sitting on that highest court. We've seen lots of conservative people move Left once they get to the Supreme Court. I don't remember anyone who has ever moved to the Right.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I'm failing to see where she would be influenced by 'payola'. It's true that politics play a role in getting onto the Supreme Court. Once on the Supreme Court the only way she can lose her job is if the House of Representatives impeaches her, the Senate tries her, and she is convicted by a super-majority vote. Her salary can never go down. She will not have to face election. She will be guaranteed employment for life.
The only way she could accept payola is if she took an outright bribe. That's not unheard of as Clarance Thomas accepted a $1 million advance on his biography one week before issuing his ruling in Eldred v Ashcroft. Nevertheless, accepting a bribe is one of very few things that could ruin a Supreme Court justice's career.
Kagan: Hey, Barack. This software patent's issue is a real head scratcher. I can't find your stance on it. Can you remind me of it?
Obama: Elena, Elena, I'm busy. To be a patentable process, innovations should involve significant extra-solution activity i.e. activity central to the purpose of the claimed method. And don't forget that no patent can wholly pre-empt the use of a fundamental principle - and I don't just mean that a field-of-use restriction will suffice, I want to be sure that the algorithm can still be used for other purposes even in that same field.
Kagan: Thanks, I'll go fluff that out and add references. (done) Sorry to have bothered you, I simply don't have the power to come up with my own viewpoints, so I wanted to clarfy what yours are.
(...or just maybe it's not a purely clerical role and there's a bit of Kagan in the document she wrote and got approved by the president.)
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
I don't see what's "liberal" about fair use.
I think people should stop trying to shoe-horn every single issue into a liberal/conservative spectrum.
No, this time it is actually about something we here at slashdot give a damn about- Copyright/IP laws. Oh, and the previous story linking to america's watchtower- yeah, that isn't exactly an objective perspective on... anything.
think about the changes the gun wreaked on the feudal system
think about the changes the printing press wreaked on traditional religious/ monarchical power structures
think about the changes the nuclear bomb wreaked on warfare and international relations
now think about the internet and its effects on copyright law
the technology came, and changed everything. time and time again
i'm not talking about civilian restrictions on dynamite or radar guns, these are tiny dots. i'm talking about the larger technological themes: the introduction of electronics, the introduction of sailing ships, the introduction of the cotton gin, etc. surely you can see how technology alter society and the law in ways no one can foresee or even understand when the technology is introduced. its not like the guys fiddling with the arpanet in the 1960s said "hey, lets destroy the recorded music industry", but that's what their invention is doing
surely you can see technological change trumps existing law, and law must alter itself and adapt
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"that is, the most addictive+inebriating: cocaine, heroin, meth, etc (marijuana should be legal)"
What about alcohol? Withdrawal effects from alcohol are worse than from opiates -- in fact, they can be deadly without medical supervision. We sell tobacco to teenagers, yet tobacco dependency is more easily formed and more difficult to break than cocaine dependence.
"its not a war, its a maintenance function of civilization, like taking out the trash every thursday"
Well, let's see. Cocaine was first made illegal because people thought that when black men used cocaine, they would become unstoppable even with a gun. Yes, that sounds like a maintenance function of civilization to me...except for the racism part. Opiates, like heroin? Made illegal because of a belief that Asian immigrants would bring their habits with them to the USA -- even though heroin could be legally purchased over the counter, as marketed by Bayer. Yup, more maintenance, if we ignore the whole racism thing.
Unlike you, I actually know the history of the war on drugs, and it is not pretty. It is one racist act of congress after another, mixed with corporate lobbying, and recently we can add a profit motive for police departments. We are not talking about drug regulation here, nor are we talking about efforts to keep people healthy -- this is an effort to imprison people on a mass scale, particularly immigrants and black people. People are serving longer prison sentences for non-violent, drug related crimes than would be typical for a murder case.
The goal is not to "win," at least not as President Reagan defined victory (a "drug-free generation"). The goal is to increase the profits of pharmaceutical, alcohol, tobacco, prison, and firearms companies, and to keep an ever expanding police force employed. Racism is a convenient means to this end: you can arrest scores of black people for drug offenses (in some localities, one third of the black men are incarcerated), and nobody in the middle or upper classes will oppose it, especially not after seeing one image of a dangerous black man after another.
Regulation and health are things I am all for. You can regulate drugs without throwing millions of people in jail or creating police forces that are as heavily armed as the military. You can protect the general health of the population without propaganda and racism. The war on drugs is not helping our society, and I hope you understand that.
Palm trees and 8
... they should love Obama's pick for her replacement as Solicitor General.
That is all.
> And Kagan got an opportunity to showcase her feelings on intellectual
> property when the US Supreme Court asked her, as US Solicitor General, to
> weigh in on the big Cablevision case.
Not her views. She was repersenting the adminstration. He personal views may or may not be the same as those she presented on behalf of her employer.
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