Yep, sounds like a great idea to deny property rights to people when they're famous enough. Totally equitable. Uh huh.

While federal government works cannot be copyrighted, they can acquire copyrights, and use independent contractors who retain copyright. That said, copyright isn't the issue here. The issue is using Obama's likeness without his permission.

Except this isn't a copyright issue. The prohibition is on image, not the picture.

Somebody please mod this up.

But copyright is a market correction, used because the market for IP fails to produce what we want. It's disingenuous to cite an economic theory based on market self-regulation in support of explicit recognition of a market's failure to regulate.

This is the legal definition of promote. Copyright, in the US, is an economic matter. Period.

That said, the invisible hand has little to do with what I said. If the market for creative works were able to self-regulate, there would be no copyright. Copyright is a market correction.

This is not an illegal threat. UCLA acknowledges that the would-be-plaintiff has a valid copyright because they entered into a licensing agreement with them. If they violate the license, not only is there a state claim for violating a contract, but a federal claim for violating the copyright. There would be no failure to state a claim, especially for a frivolous suit. Intellectual property is very, very special and viewed as unique. Accordingly, the bar for frivolity is just that much higher.

No matter what you think, it is not clear. Fair use is almost never clear. It is also not bad faith, for the same reasons I outlined above.

No it doesn't. Federal law grants you copyright when you fix a creative work to a medium. You can call yourself whatever the heck you want - it doesn't matter, and you don't have to know anything about your rights. Not that I should have to tell anybody this, but requiring you know something about your rights to have your rights is counter to the very concept of what it means to have a right as opposed to an advantage.

This is very misleading. Sovereign immunity, while it has recently applied to the Lanham Act (trademarks and unfair competition) and federal patent statutes, has not been tested against copyright (at least to my knowledge). Not that it matters. At worst this means that you cannot sue the State of California or a federal agency for violating your valid copyright. However, you can still sue an employee of either, and obtain an injunction to get them to stop using your intellectual property. When one of these employees/officials acts in violation of a valid federal statute - like anything under Title 17 - that official is by definition acting outside the scope of their employment, which is all sovereign immunity will protect.

"Promote" in the sense you want to use it is shortsighted. Copyright promotes science and art by incentivizing authors to create/author works by providing economic reason to justify competing. If you imagine, 'how can we do the most with what we got' as some kind of promotion, you're losing sight of how to get there in the first place, and how to incentivize people to share too.

Except that allowing or enabling licensing violations is bad precedent. Surely they backed down because they realized they had no case. After all, they needed licensing in the first place. If this were to qualify as fair use, so too would that.

That makes sense. Thanks for the reply.

Why don't they work together? Seems awfully inefficient not to share data, which this appears to imply.

Solely owned != sole use

This is wrong. In a lot of ways.

First, as has been said many times in these comments already, we're dealing with TM when using the term "Superbowl" and copyright when we dealing with showing it on TV. Though you probably don't know it, and besides the fact that a bar would also have to serve alcohol, the statutory exception you're referring to is an exception to the copyright rights. Certain kinds of establishments are allowed to violate the holder's copyright (and here I mean the prima facie violation of a section 106 right). And I believe I'm remembering this correctly, but the size of the TV's doesn't matter. It's the size of the establishment and the number of TV's.

Second, sports bars can get fair use. Whether a court finds a fair use depends on a balance of assorted factors, only one of which is whether the organization is for profit.

Yeah, the big thing here is that nobody is going to be confused.

I'm also trying to figure out how viewing on that size of a screen could possibly be a copyright violation. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any exemptions like this. Not that it'd surprise me, since there are all sorts of special interest exemptions. Hell, maybe the NFL got one specially placed! The tax code [501(c)(6)] has one carved out for professional football leagues. Not that any exemption would matter anyway. It'd totally be against the NFL's best interests to litigate.