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."

Comments

Re:Bad on software patents

[PopeRatzo]

hat's because Democrat Presidents tend to nominate moderates

Except that the justices who have moved most to the Left have been the ones appointed by Republicans.

John Paul Stevens is an example of that. He was appointed by Gerald Ford and sold as a conservative. He is arguably the furthest Left of any Justice currently sitting on the Court.

But maybe you have a point. Recent Republican presidents have appointed justices so far to the Right that there's really no place for them to go but Left.

Robert Bork would almost certainly be considered not conservative enough by today's Republicans because he took the 2nd Amendment literally and believed it only applied to "well-regulated militias" and did not give everybody the right to pack heat.