Jason Schultz has reproduced a bunch of Steve Martin's high-larious script notes for "The Passion" from this month's New Yorker.

* Love the Jesus character. So likeable. He can't seem to catch a break! We identify with him because of it.

Ralph "Don't Run" Nader has won a key legal battle against Mastercard. Mastercard sued Nader over a parody of its "priceless" ad campaign that Nader maintained was a fair use — and today the NY Southern District Court ruled in Nader's favor. — Read the rest

Most legal briefs are boring and vaccilating, couched in a thousand maybes and coulds and other qualifiers. Thus, it's a pleasure to read a brief in which a lawyer lays down some muscular, no-nonsense prose in defense of a good cause. — Read the rest

BoingBoing reader Larry sends an interesting "loophole" for Orkut's much-bemoaned TOS:

I noticed that people have been making a stink about Orkut.com's TOS lately, saying that it reserves the right to do pretty much anything with content posted to Orkut.com. I was actually a little more disturbed by another item from the TOS.

Jason Schultz, my cow-orker at EFF, has written a lucid legal analysis about the latest turn in Harlan Ellison's ongoing suit against AOL/Time-Warner, in which he asserts that AOL should actively police its newsfeeds and restrict access to feeds that carry infringing materials, and be on the hook if they are insufficently diligent in their restriction of access to information. — Read the rest

My co-worker Jason Schultz has written a great LawGeek article about the way that copyright and the Kuleshov effect (in which art can be made to mean opposing things throught framing or recontextualizing) interact. The US courts have handed down some jaw-droppingly stupid rulings on this matter, as it turns out, in relation to a company called   Albuquerque ART. — Read the rest

Hot on the heels of Creative Commons' announcement of the Sampling License (which allows you to license your work for reuse, on the condition that only samples, and not the whole work, are used), comes this lucid legal/economic analysis from my co-worker Jason Schultz of what the real benefit of a Sampling License will be: the network effect. — Read the rest

My colleague Jason Schultz has blogged some pithy remarks about the head of WIPO's comparison of copyright infringement to terrorism. God, how I hate the comparison of all things to terrorism, it's such shoddy rhetoric. Really: if copyright infringement is like terrorism, does that mean that our first line of defense against illicit music downloading shoud be the systematic confiscation of nailfiles and scissors from business travellers? — Read the rest