Cross-posted at Consumer Law & Policy Blog
By Paul Alan Levy
In the last couple of weeks, both the Obama campaign and the McCain campaign have experienced the sort of abusive use of the intellectual property laws that Greg Beck and I have previously discussed here – the invocation of phony copyright or trademark claims to suppress their free speech. In the recent cases, TV networks complained to YouTube about the use of footage from news reports in their campaign advertisements, invoking the takedown provisions, in section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or “DMCA.” And if IP owners can get away with suppressing the speech of the presidential candidates from our two major parties when they criticize each other, that just shows how vulnerable the rest of us are when we use the Internet to criticize companies.
