Marvel Lawsuits: Is It Time for a Review of Copyright Termination Rights and the Work for Hire Test?

Carolyn Wimbly Martin and Ethan Barr

A more technical version of this Insight, geared to practitioners, was published by Law360. On Friday, September 24, 2021, the comic book publisher Marvel initiated five lawsuits in federal courts, attempting to invalidate copyright termination notices sent by a former writer and the estates of several former artists. The copyrights in question included some of […]

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DMCA Takedown Notices: A Valuable Tool for Copyright Holders, Yet Subject to Abuse

Carolyn Wimbly Martin and Margaret Horstman

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), internet service providers (ISPs) are protected from liability for the copyright infringements of their users if they adopt certain measures to identify and protect copyrighted works and implement a policy for handling infringers. ISPs cannot have knowledge of specific and identifiable instances of infringement, nor can they be […]

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Preserving Cultural Heritage: Some Bright Spots Amidst the Losses

Our prior insights about cultural heritage have dealt with irreparable losses and the limitations of using traditional intellectual property law to preserve intangible cultural assets. We have also focused on the controversies that arise when IP law and traditional values collide. For example, the 50th anniversary in July 2021 of the creation of the Australian […]

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Big Business is Watching: Employee Tracking in the Workplace

Carolyn Wimbly Martin and Robert Piper

Rapid advances in technology have enabled employers to track employees with greater granularity and detail than ever before. At Amazon, roughly one in ten firings is due to a “low productivity score” as determined by a computer program. This algorithm tracks an employee’s “time off task,” or the amount of time a worker spends away […]

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