They seem now to be part of the accepted armament of campaign law. “Of course the McCain-Palin team could counter-notify, but the DMCA’s 10-14 business day waiting period makes that option next to useless, when ’10 days can be a lifetime in a political campaign.'” (Seltzer/Citizen Media Law, Levy/CL&P; but see Ron Coleman, Oct. 15: process need not be as slow as waiting period implies).
Related: Does trademark law allow candidates to suppress some types of opposition keyword advertising, as when candidates put up negative ads keyed to each others’ names? [Levy/CL&P]
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The copyright situation in the U.S. is a mess. The original purpose of copyright protection has been corrupted by moneyed interests and politicians have happily gone along with it, as long as the money kept flowing. It’s refreshing to see this issue come back and bite them. Of course, they offer the typical politicians’ solution, which is that the onerous rules they have foisted upon the public should not apply to them. No surprise there.
[…] UPDATE: A good analysis of the trademark issues from Paul Alan Levy, via Overlawyered. […]
I had a vague memory of that part of the debate agreement was that the footage would not be used by the campaigns. Anyone know anything about that?
For an eye-opening discussion of the problem of copyright “overreaching” in this and other contexts, see Jason Mazzone’s article, “Copyfraud,” published by New York University. It is available for (free) download here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=787244