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Howard Hughes, Copyright, and Censorship

An example of a system gone as mad as the billionaire who tried to exploit it:

A corporation controlled by Howard Hughes purchased the copyrights to several articles that had been written about him and then used them to attack an “unauthorized” biography with a copyright infringement suit.

Wendy J. Gordon, “An Inquiry into the Merits of Copyright: The Challenges of Consistency, Consent, and Encouragement Theory,” Stanford Law Review 41 (1989), p. 1343, 1351 n. 28, citing William F. Patry, The Fair Use Privilege in Copyright Law 73 (1985).

See also Mike Masnick’s post Copyright As Censorship: How Howard Hughes Used Copyright To Try To Block Biography He Didn’t Like.

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To the extent possible under law, Stephan Kinsella has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to C4SIF. This work is published from: United States. In the event the CC0 license is unenforceable a  Creative Commons License Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License is hereby granted.