Rebecca Tushnet

Two boxes of $2 pasta have led to a possible class-action lawsuit that could cost Barilla millions of dollars, according to legal experts. A pair…

The U.S. Supreme Court is set to ponder in a case centering on paintings by the late artist Andy Warhol a question as philosophical as…

Over the past decade, Google has consistently documented its efforts to remove links from its search results to content that the tech giant considers pirated,…

California’s new law requiring social media platforms like Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook and Twitter Inc. to disclose their content moderation policies is likely to face…

Bloomberg Law – A decades-old law that criminalizes hacking through digital security measures to access copyrighted work like music, movies, and software is facing a…

Forward – Last month, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a law requiring museums to label artworks known to have been looted by the Nazis.

Bloomberg Law – A trademark dispute between Vans Inc. and a Brooklyn-based art studio is set to rekindle a debate about how courts should properly…

Like an over-protective parent, toymaker Mattel Inc has long had a reputation for zealously defending its Barbie doll-related intellectual property. So when Rap Snacks Inc…

In May 2007, fanfiction and traditionally published author Naomi Novik wrote a post on LiveJournal. “We are sitting quietly by the fireside, creating piles and…

I cannot tell you how many ads I’ve been served by various interested firms since sports betting became legal in New York State this year. Caesar’s Sportsbook has J.B. Smoove and Halle Berry encouraging me to gamble. FanDuel and DraftKings, pioneers of mobile-app sports betting, have constant promotional campaigns offering free money for my first bet. All of these massive marketing budgets have, as their north star and balance-sheet justification, one principle: it’s worth spending a big chunk of change to get a big chunk of people addicted to gambling on your platform. The House might not be a physical building on the Vegas strip, but it still always wins. ... Why is Joe Camel out of bounds, then, but ads for booze and gambling are above-board? I asked Rebecca Tushnet, the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Law School—who specializes in, among other things, advertising law—what the deal is here. As it turns out, it’s a particularly American cocktail of strident free-speech principles, waxing and waning puritanical attitudes, and corporate power. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Andy Parker, the father of Alison Parker, the television reporter who was shot and killed in 2015 by a former colleague, created an NFT of the video of the fatal shooting in hopes it will give him power to remove clips from social media, The Washington Post reported. ... Dr. Rebecca Tushnet, a professor of law at Harvard Law School whose work focuses on copyright, trademark and false advertising law, told Insider she believed "there's a 0% chance that this will work." "I see no path forward through NFTs for this person who suffered an unspeakable tragedy," Tushnet said. "I don't know who encouraged this, but it is not going to give him what he wants."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group of law professors and others on Wednesday urged the Eleventh Circuit to reject Apple's appeal of a lower court's decision that Corellium LLC's "virtual" version of the iPhone to detect potential bugs was protected by copyright's fair use doctrine. ... Several copyright professors, including Rebecca Tushnet of Harvard Law School, filed their own briefs in support of Corellium on Wednesday, saying that the "public benefits when copyright owners do not have a monopoly on information about the potential flaws in their works."

Advocates for the disabled, public libraries and documentary filmmakers have urged the D.C. Circuit to rule that a law making it a crime to circumvent technical features controlling access to copyrighted works violates the First Amendment. ... Copyright scholars Pamela Samuelson of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law and Rebecca Tushnet of Harvard Law School also filed an amicus brief Wednesday, arguing that the provisions "disregard and override traditional mechanisms within the Copyright Act that struck the balance between copyright protection and First Amendment interests."

American conceptual artist Barbara Kruger is urging the U.S. Supreme Court to look into the Second Circuit's decision that found Andy Warhol's artwork didn't make fair use of a photo of music legend Prince, saying that such works are "far from lacking creativity." ... Also on Monday, a group of copyright law professors, including Rebecca Tushnet of Harvard Law School, asked the Supreme Court to review the case. They argued that the Second Circuit wrongly disregarded the meaning of the contending works to determine why Warhol's art was transformative, which ultimately infected the court's fair use analysis. "It's [an] important fair use case for all artists, especially those without big names and deep pockets, and I believe the court will see its significance," Tushnet told Law360 by email Wednesday.

“The Ruin stirs, and the Five Realms rumble,” a now-archived web announcement read on Thursday morning. “You are cordially invited to join New York Times bestselling and award-winning authors Marie Lu, Tahereh Mafi, Ransom Riggs, Adam Silvera, David Yoon, and Nicola Yoon in Realms of Ruin, a collaborative fantasy epic filled with dark magic, intrigue, and unique characters -- launched online in a thrilling new way.” ... As the catalyst for this collaborative fantasy epic, these authors would post twelve initial origin stories about their fictional universe, to which they owned the copyright. ... Within hours, fans confronted the authors in the Discord server with their concerns about the project. Rebecca Tushnet, the Frank Stanton Professor of First Amendment Law at Harvard Law School, summed the situation up aptly. “It’s a turducken of things people don’t understand,” she said. In other words, on top of the usual NFT concerns, the team would also be facing copyright questions and confronting the historical hesitancy from fan fiction writers over monetization of their works in a commercial environment.

Chloe Clem did not intend to be an Internet sensation. She didn’t know her facial expression would resonate with fans for years to come. And she certainly didn’t know it would make her family more than $74,000. .... Eight years later, a non-fungible token (NFT) of the meme was sold Friday to 3F Music, a music production company based in Dubai, for 25 Ether — the cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network — which was worth more than $74,000 around the time of the sale. ... NFTs generally represent specific versions of digital files, though an NFT could also be assigned to an object, said Rebecca Tushnet, a professor of intellectual property law at Harvard Law School. “It is a way of saying, ‘I have a unique instance of a thing that is in fact infinitely replicable,’” she said. “It is basically artificially created uniqueness.”