Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Vindication (Sort Of)

I've been arguing (privately, at least) that the Copyright Act preempts the hot news doctrine for a while now. (Making that argument during an interview for a position at the Copyright Office was perhaps not the best idea.) But it looks like yesterday the Second Circuit lent some support to that position. I would have liked to see the Second Circuit go further, but it seems pretty clear to me that media outfits that follow the news aggregation Best Practices set out in the CMLP white paper should have a pretty strong argument for preemption. More on the decision.