Copyright Craziness

Two interesting copyright blurbs crossed my path today. Both could (potentially) serve as object lessons about the overreach of current law.

First, the company that owns the rights to George Orwell's 1984 (it bought the rights from his estate in 1981) is considering suing the guy who made the pro-Obama ad parody of the classic Apple commercial. Orwell's novel remains in copyright protection (assuming no further extensions - hardly a given) until 2044. "But wait," you're saying, "isn't ad really a knock off of the Apple commercial in the first place?" Yes, but that ad wasn't blessed by the copyright holders either:

After Apple aired its Mac introductory ad during Super Bowl XVII, Rosenblum sent a 'cease and desist' letter to the computer maker, she said in yesterday's statement. 'When the Apple 'Big Brother' television commercial was aired during the 1984 Super Bowl telecast, we immediately objected to this unauthorized commercial use of the novel, and sent a 'cease-and-desist' letter both to Apple and to its ad agency,' Rosenblum said. 'The commercial never aired on television again.'

OK, fine. Apple didn't really have a reason to fight it at the time - they got the bump and PR they needed, no need to risk court action. "But wait," you're saying now, "the pro-Obama ad was political speech and parody on top of that - won't the First Amendment protect him?" Right off the top of my head, I'd say yes, as the copyright holders seem to realize:

'The political ad copies a prior commercial infringement of our copyright,' said Rosenblum in a statement. 'We recognize the legal issues inherent under the First Amendment and the copyright law as to political expression of opinion, but we want the world at large to know that we take our copyright ownership of one of the world's great novels very seriously.'

In other words, "keep your virtual mouth shut, or else."

Next, this article from the Washington Post, comes word that several student are suing a plagiarism detection company:

The lawsuit, filed this week in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, seeks $900,000 in damages from the for-profit service known as Turnitin. The service seeks to root out cheaters by comparing student term papers and essays against a database of more than 22 million student papers as well as online sources and electronic archives of journals. In the process, the student papers are added to the database.

* * *

'All of these kids are essentially straight-A students, and they have no interest in plagiarizing,' said Robert A. Vanderhye, a McLean attorney representing the students pro bono. 'The problem with [Turnitin] is the archiving of the documents. They are violating a right these students have to be in control of their own property.'

This raises at least two issues in my mind. First, who owns the copyright to student works? It doesn't seem clear to me that the students do. Are student works similar to works for hire, in which the copyright resides with the mother company or government works in which the copyright resides with the agency for which it was produced? For example, I do not control the copyrights in the briefs I write, my office does.

Second, assuming some of the material is plagiarized (which, from the story, it doesn't appear to be), what copyright claim could the kids make? If it does have copyright protection, they would violated it themselves by copying it, right?

Both of these cases make me think that the only area of law that's more interesting than criminal law is copyright.