Free for a Fee

For the last several years, the Center for Social Media at American University (directed by Pat Aufderheide) and the Program for Information Justice at the University law school (with which I’m affiliated) have been worked with various groups of practitioners (documentary filmmakers, media literacy educations, on-line video makers, providers of open courseware, dance archives, and others) to devise so-called Statements or Codes of Best Practices in fair use for those communities.

Some information about that effort can be found at http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/fair_use/. Now, thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the Association of Research Libraries, we’ll be part of a team devising fair use standards for institutional collections of print and other media in support of teaching and scholarship.

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[Post by Venkat]

Facebook v. Power Ventures, Case No. 5:08-cv-05780 JW (N.D. Cal.) (Facebook Motion) (EFF Amicus Brief)

Facebook and Power Ventures have been locked in a dispute over whether Power Ventures can access Facebook’s website and network outside of Facebook’s authorized developer channels. The dispute yielded an interesting ruling on Power.com’s motion to dismiss. The parties are both seeking summary judgment on the issue of whether Power.com’s conduct violates California Penal Code section 502(c). EFF recently weighed in with an amicus brief which makes the already interesting dispute even more interesting.

The Dispute: Facebook brought Computer Fraud and Abuse Act claims and copyright claims (along with a slew of other claims) against Power.com. Setting aside the peripheral trademark and CAN-SPAM claims, Facebook’s key allegations are that (1) Power.com accessed Facebook’s network “without authorization” in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (and section 502(c), the California computer crime statute); (2) Power.com accessed Facebook’s network in violation of the Facebook terms of use; and (3) Power.com copied the copyrighted portions of the Facebook website in the process of allowing Facebook users to access Facebook through Power.com’s interface. (There’s also an anti-circumvention claim tied to the unauthorized copying claim.) The court denied Power.com’s motion to dismiss. (See coverage of the court’s initial ruling on Power.com’s motion to dismiss from Tom O’Toole, Jeff Neuburger, and Cyberlaw Cases.)

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The RIAA has asked the federal judge overseeing the LimeWire case to slap a permanent injunction on LimeWire until it can clean up its copyright troubles to the labels’ satisfaction. . . .

LimeWire was found liable for massive copyright infringement a few weeks back. Judge Kimba Wood’s ruling cited internal LimeWire documents showing a knowledge of all the infringement taking place through LimeWire’s software—and little done to stop it.

“In the weeks since this Court’s Order, what has Lime Wire done to try to halt or limit the infringement it has induced?” ask the RIAA lawyers. “The answer, from all appearances, is nothing.”

The RIAA now proposes that the judge shut down the service and forbid LimeWire from distributing its software or running advertising.

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The content in this post was found at http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/06/riaa-wants-limewire-shut-down-over-rampant-illegal-conduct.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

By Eric Goldman

Miller v. Facebook, Inc., 2010 WL 2198204 (N.D. Cal. May 28, 2010)

This is my third time blogging about this case (Jan. 2010 post; April 2010 post). The facts as alleged by the plaintiff have always been a bit sketchy, but here’s my understanding of plaintiff’s beef. Plaintiff is a game developer who developed a game called Boomshine. He alleges Yeo created an infringing version of Boomshine. Yeo then distributed the allegedly infringing version via Facebook, but Facebook’s misconduct has been a little muddled. Miller’s latest attempt to explain Facebook’s wrongful behavior is that (1) “the ChainRxn game was allegedly presented by Facebook’s website to its users through the use of an inline frame (or an ‘iFrame’) so that the content appeared to be originating from Facebook’s website” and (2) Facebook “‘took the ‘affirmative step’ to approve the ChainRxn game for publication in the Facebook Application Directory.” These allegations take the lawsuit squarely into territory governed by the Ninth Circuit’s Perfect 10 v. Amazon ruling.

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Imagine yourself as a lawyer who wants to sue 4,577 anonymous Internet users for swapping the Uwe Boll-produced film Far Cry through BitTorrent networks. Would you prefer to file one lawsuit, pay one filing fee, and submit one set of documents, or would you like to file 4,577 separate lawsuits, each with their own filing fees and documents?

The question answers itself, and it explains why Boll’s law firm of Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver filed a single federal lawsuit against “Does 1-4,577” in DC’s District Court earlier this year.

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Canada’s long-awaited copyright modernization bill appeared today. If passed, it would explicitly legalize DVRs, YouTube mashups, backups, and parodies—and it would slap strong, US-style restrictions on bypassing DRM.

Forget fair dealing; as in the US, digital locks trump all.

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The content in this post was found at http://mariaipexpert.wordpress.com/2010/05/29/online-copyright-infringement-case/ and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

eBay, Facebook, Yahoo, and Ask.com owner IAC/Interactive may compete with Google for users, views and ad clicks, but the four know which side their bread is buttered on when it comes to digital copyright law. That’s why they’ve rushed to Google’s side this week to defend their rival in a massive copyright infringement lawsuit launched by Viacom.

Viacom’s interpretation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) “would slow development of the Internet by making the hosting of user generated content an activity fraught with legal peril,” eBay et al warned the court hearing the case in an amici brief. “The threat of ruinous liability would mean that other companies and services might never get off the ground in the first place.”

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The US District Court of California denied adult entertainment company Perfect 10’s request for an injunction against file-sharing service RapidShare on Thursday, saying that the company did not offer sufficient proof that RapidShare itself had infringed on Perfect 10’s copyrights.

Perfect 10 filed its lawsuit against RapidShare in late 2009, alleging that the Germany-based service illegally hosted the company’s images for its members to distribute and download. Since P10 is a for-pay service, it argued that RapidShare was violating its distribution rights and making money off of its stolen content due to RapidShare’s affiliate program that pays members for referring new users.

The content in this post was found at http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/05/rapidshare-didnt-infringe-on-copyrights-says-us-court.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.