By John Tehranian, the Irwin R. Buchalter Professor of Law at Southwestern Law School and the Biederman Entertainment and Media Law Institute in Los Angeles, California, and a founding partner of One LLP.
Shortly after taking office in 2009, President Barack Obama announced that he would end the use of Guantanamo Bay as a detention camp for enemy combatants in the war on terrorism. Although it appears increasingly unlikely that the President will achieve this goal any time in the near future, the eventual closing of the facility would potentially do away with a number of controversial policies. Of those practices, one of the more unusual was the military’s arguably infringing use of music on the prisoners. The soundtrack to Guantanamo Bay, it turns out, was replete with copyrighted songs meant to addle and unnerve, especially on repeat. And, apparently, the government lacked an appropriate license to publicly perform these songs.
As a preliminary matter, the playlist at Guantanamo — at least during the Bush years — was, according to press reports, filled with curious choices. For example, it included Fuck Your God — a particularly bizarre selection considering the Bush Administration’s religiosity and the federal government’s position, through the FCC, on the use of indecent language in other contexts. Guantanamo Bay’s Top Ten List — the songs most frequently played to interrogate prisoners — featured a perverse smorgasbord of heavy metal, children’s music, and (seemingly) patriotic stadium rock:
, Inc. rejected a proposed settlement, which would have given Google the right to sell electronic copies of out-of-print books. The opinion is short, readable, and filled with eloquent quotations from objections, many filed pro se. It moves quickly through more issues than I could discuss in a blog post, so here I'll focus on its central holding, that this kind of "forward-looking business arrangement" is simply beyond the court's power to approve under Rule 23.
thors and publishers, saying the settlement "would simply go too far."
atekeeper for who could get access to those materials."
Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that the industry that gave us the punch card loom, the direct ancestor of the modern computer, is on the cutting edge of development in IP. U.S. law, however, has long excluded most creative fashion designs from protection, apart from their trademarked labels and logos, even as other major fashion-producing countries have developed design rights. Europe, Japan, and India all have laws that cover fashion design; France has been protecting its celebrated Parisian couture for over a century. American fashion designers have been seeking legal recognition for at least that long, and they are finally poised to achieve it in a way that alters the contours of IP law as well.