Google v. Oracle: Weighing Fair Use Factors in Software Copyright Infringement Cases
Guodong Fu The ongoing battle for clarity on the limitation of United States copyright protection in the software industry has yielded inconsistent results over the past ten years. Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., currently before the Supreme Court, may finally shed some light on the status of copyright protection as applied to software. In deciding the case, the Court must balance the four fair use factors as applied to software copyrights. The Court will likely navigate a fine line to balance maintaining a market of interoperability with fair competition. This Essay argues that the Supreme Court should maintain a...
Defining Copyright Protections on Social Media in the Age of Instagram #Reposts
Jessica Barbaria Globally, more than one billion people use Instagram every month. It is no wonder Instagram’s impressive user base has attracted big businesses to the platform. Brands seeking to grow their audiences often turn to social media to reach new customers, engage with existing customers, and source marketing content. Despite brands’ increasing reliance on Instagram, the legal boundaries of social media marketing are not well defined. Brands do not always know when they have permission to exploit user-generated content, and users do not always feel their content is fully protected. To clarify this uncertainty, Congress should amend the Copyright...
ISP Regulation and Antitrust: The Case for Better Competition
David Yangli Wang This Note firstly discusses net neutrality and ISP regulations broadly– do we see it as a commerce issue, a government regulation issue, a data fairness issue, or even a human rights issue? And if we decide that ISPs must be regulated, what type of antitrust regulation will be most effective? This Note takes a comparative look at Internet regulations around the world, examining both the development of broadband infrastructures and the antitrust laws (or lack thereof) of such countries. This Note ultimately concludes that the current antitrust regime in the United States will not be able to...
Avoid the Rainy Day: Survey of U.S. Cloud Computing Caselaw
Fernando M. Pinguelo; Bradford W. Muller Cloud computing, a computer networking model that gives users on-demand access to shared software applications and data storage, is becoming increasingly popular among businesses and individuals. For example, if you use Google’s Gmail for your email and calendaring, or Snapfish for your online photo sharing and storage; or if your business remotely stores data with a third-party server provider like Salesforce, or uses Windows Azure to create and host web applications and services, you are already “floating in a cloud.” To provide guidance to those companies working within a cloud – or those considering...
Google’s Literary Quest in Peril
Michael Goldstein Recently, Google, Inc. (hereinafter “Google”), owner of the eponymous search engine, partnered with several libraries, in an effort to make their collections available for search on the Internet. This project has come under attack by The Author’s Guild (hereinafter “The Guild”). The Guild complains that scanning and uploading copyrighted works without the authors’ consent violates their rights under the Copyright Act. Google counters that its use of sections from the copyrighted works falls under the “fair use” doctrine described in the Copyright Act. However, the Guild notes that in order to use these sections, Google first reproduced the...