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Tech Dirt
Timothy Geigner
Jul 10th 2020

There is obviously a great deal of action going on currently in the streaming world, spurred on in part by the COVID-19 crises that has many people at home looking for fresh content. Between the attempts to respond to social movements and tamp down “hateful” content to changes to the competitive landscape, streaming services are having themselves a moment. But with the sudden uptick in popularity comes a new spotlight painting a target on streaming platforms for everyone from scammers to intellectual property maximilists.

Twitch has recently found itself a target for the latter, suddenly getting slammed with a wave of DMCA notices that appear to focus mostly on background music.

Copyright strikes are an occupational hazard for many Twitch streamers and content creators, but a recent surge of DMCA takedown requests has overwhelmed the community. Now, Twitch support staff has responded to complaints, stating that the claims are focused on clips with background music from 2017 to 2019, and recommending that streamers remove them. The tweets also state that this is the first time that Twitch has received mass DMCA claims against clips.

Given that Twitch is still most popular as a site for live-streams and let’s-plays of video games, the speculation is that a great deal of this is targeting clips that include video game music. And, as we’ve seen elsewhere, it’s also the case that scammers are currently using game music as a method to try to takedown or monetize the videos of others. Whether or not that’s what is going on here is anyone’s guess, as Twitch is making it fairly clear that the flood of notices is so large that it’s simply taking down content and advising its streamers to proactively take down anything that might include this sort of copyrighted content.

Except that leaves no room for a number of things, including arguments for Fair Use of certain music,

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An update from Kaitie Eke, one of the firm’s summer associates:

A copyright infringement lawsuit filed by four major publishing companies against the Internet Archive has prompted early termination of the site’s National Emergency Library, a project that made books available electronically during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the project’s conclusion may render some of the publishers’ complaints moot, the suit also takes aim at the ongoing operation of the Open Library and larger Controlled Digital Lending (“CDL”) practices.

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The content in this post was found at https://www.lexblog.com/2020/06/30/suit-takes-aim-at-internet-archive-spurs-end-of-national-emergency-library/ Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com

LexBlog/99 park row
June 26, 2020
Rick Sanders

Americans assume copyright is something you have to register for. The rest of the world assumes either registration is voluntary or honestly doesn’t know what you’re talking about.

The truth about copyright registration, in the United States, is a little more complicated. Or, more accurately, a little more mystical. You do not need to register a work to have copyright in it. Copyright attaches itself (“vests in”) the author as soon as it’s “fixed in a tangible medium.” As a result, almost everything you’ve ever written, doodled, painted in an art class, sculpted out of Play-Doh®, sketched out, etc. is protected by copyright.¹For the rest of your life, plus another 70 years, so your heirs can benefit from those notes, doodles, emails, finger-paintings, etc.

BUT: Unless and until you register your work, you cannot enforce the copyright.

Having an unregistered copyright is a bit like having only the blueprints for a house, then trying to live in it.

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The content in this post was found at https://www.lexblog.com/2020/06/26/dumb-mistake-in-copyright-registration-leads-to-brutal-and-unjust-consequences/ Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com

Orange County – Nick Jonas – along with Jonas Brothers Enterprises, LLC – have been sued by Joshua Wong Photography, LLC for copyright infringement. The complaint was filed yesterday June 22, 2020 in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York.  The claim stems from a photograph of Priyanka Chopra that was shared by Nick Jonas on both Instagram and Twitter. Joshua Wong Photography claims the use was unauthorized and thus a violation of the Copyright Act.

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The content in this post was found at https://www.mandourlaw.com/blog/jonasbrothers-sued-for-copyright-infringement/ Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com

Tech Dirt
Mike Masnick
Apr 27th 2020

The long saga of Georgia locking up its laws under copyright is (hopefully) officially over, with a Supreme Court ruling that says pretty explicitly that the law must be in the public domain.

….

Earlier today, the Supreme Court ruled mostly in favor of Carl Malamud and free access to our laws, though there is a bit of weirdness in the overall ruling. The key part is the most important though. You just can’t copyright the law.

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Technology & Marketing Law Blog
Eric Goldman
April 17, 2020

This is a copyright infringement lawsuit against Charter, an Internet access provider, for users’ copyright infringements by file-sharing. I comprehensively blogged the magistrate report in this case back in October. In that blog post, I described the magistrate’s report as “a major win for copyright owners in their irrepressible quest to deputize IAPs as their copyright sheriffs.” Charter objected to the magistrate report’s analysis of vicarious copyright infringement. The district court judge’s response opinion is…UGH.

…

Conclusion

In my prior post, I wrote: “copyright owners aren’t going to stop until they turn IAPs into their copyright cops. This has their dream for decades, and this ruling moves one step closer to it.”

In particular, the opinion highlights how we desperately need a well-functioning 512(a) safe harbor for Internet access providers. Over and over again, the court cites facts that just show Charter offered Internet access, which the court treats as enough to establish a prima facie case of vicarious copyright infringement. That can’t be right.

The damage in this case can be traced to prior rulings requiring that IAPs “terminate repeat infringers” based on notices of claimed infringement rather than judicial findings of actual user infringement. By creating that bypass, copyright owners can work around 512(a), which opens up a Pandora’s box of liability that does not bode well for the future of Internet access.

The Senate is currently undertaking a 20 year review of the DMCA. It would be wise for Congress to figure out why 512(a) failed to achieve its purported purpose–and how it might be rehabilitated.

Finally, this ruling shows how far the vicarious copyright infringement doctrine has strayed from its roots. Vicarious copyright infringement started as a branchoff of agency law. The IAP-subscriber relationship bears absolutely no resemblance to a principal-agent relationship, yet here we are. We need better limiting principles to the vicarious copyright infringement doctrine so that it does not extend, illogically, to typical vendor-customer relationships.

Case citation: Warner Records Inc. v. Charter Communications, Inc., No. 19-cv-00874-RBJ-MEH (D. Colo. April 15, 2020)

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The content in this post was found at https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2020/04/another-terrible-copyright-ruling-on-iaps-liability-for-users-file-sharing-warner-v-charter.htm Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post. and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com

It’s been said many times over that if libraries did not currently exist, there’s no way that publishers would allow them to come into existence today. Libraries are, in fact, a lovely and important artifact of a pre-copyright time when we actually valued knowledge sharing, rather than locking up knowledge behind a paywall. Last week, the Internet Archive announced what it’s calling a National Emergency Library — a very useful and sensible offering, as we’ll explain below. However, publishers and their various organizations freaked out (leading some authors to freak out as well). The freak out is not intellectually honest or consistent, but we’ll get there.

As you may or may not know, for a while now, the Internet Archive and many other libraries have been using a system called Controlled Digital Lending, which was put together to enable digital checkouts of books for which there may not be any ebooks available. Basically, the Archive helped a bunch of libraries scan a ton of books, and the libraries lend them out just as if they were lending out regular books. They keep the physical copy on the shelf and will not lend out more copies of the digital book than the physical copies they hold — basically doing exactly what a library does. There are strong arguments for why this is clearly legal. Scanning a book you own is legal. Lending out books is legal.
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Tech Dirt
Timothy Geigner
April 1, 2020

Somehow, it’s been nearly four years since a tattoo company, Solid Oak Sketches, decided to sue 2K Sports, the studio behind the renowned NBA 2K franchise, claiming that the game’s faithful representation of several stars’ tattoos was copyright infringement. The company claimed to own the copyright on the design of several players’ tattoos, including most famously LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, and DeAndre Jordan. The claim in the suit was that 2K’s faithful depiction of the players, whom had collectively licensed their likenesses via the NBAPA, somehow violated Solid Oak’s IP rights.

Put another way, it could be said that by branding the player with Solid Oak’s designs, the company seems to think it can control the players’ ability to profit off of their own likenesses. That this draws the mind to very uncomfortable historical parallels apparently was of no issue to Solid Oak.

Well, while 2K Sports failed to get the court to dismiss the case back in 2018, it has more recently won the case on summary judgement, with the court quite helpfully getting everything right and declaring the depiction of tattoos in video games in this manner to be Fair Use.

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The content in this post was found at https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200401/11212244213/court-manages-to-get-nba2k-tattoo-copyright-trademark-case-exactly-right.shtml Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post. and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com