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IP Watchdog

Franco Galbo
April 6, 2018

Of all of the things NFL quarterback Tom Brady has been accused of ruining over the years, the internet is not necessarily at the top of the list, and certainly not based on an alleged copyright infringement that he had no part in perpetuating. Yet, a photograph of him and Danny Ainge, the general manager of the Boston Celtics, could in fact forever change the internet and online publishing as we know it.

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You probably remember this case. Copyright owners sued the video hosting site Vimeo for third party uploaded videos that allegedly infringed their copyrights. Given this was the paradigmatic situation the DMCA safe harbor was designed to address, you’d think this would result in a quick-and-cheap defense win.

HA! This lawsuit was filed in December 2009, so it’s closing in on its decade anniversary. In 2013, the district court ruled that the DMCA safe harbor did not apply to state copyrighted works, including pre-1972 sound recordings. In an important ruling in 2016, the Second Circuit reversed that ruling, holding that the DMCA safe harbor did apply to state copyrights. The Second Circuit’s ruling had other provisions generally favorable to Vimeo.

Case citation: Capital Records LLC v. Vimeo LLC, 2018 WL 1634123 (SDNY March 31, 2018). [the court caption in this ruling spells it “Capital,” even though the case name is Capitol.]

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Techdirt

March 3, 2018

Another case of YouTube’s copyright notification system being abused has filtered down through social media. A YouTuber whose channel specializes in game reviews was targeted by the developer of the game after some back-and-forth on the internet over his negative review.

Chris Hodgkinson reviewed a game called Super Seducer, which supposedly teaches dudes how to pick up women through the magical art of full-motion video. Call it “edutainment.” (If you must…) The developer, Richard La Ruina, didn’t care for his game being featured on a video series entitled “This is the Worst Game Ever.” Nor did he care for Hodgkinson’s suggestion the game offered nothing to men in the way of usable pick-up artistry.

[It’s impossible to blog about Section 230 without reminding you that it remains highly imperiled. Also, I have several other Section 230 rulings to blog that I’ll get to eventually.]

I previously described the facts of this case:

Dawn J. Bennett was a financial advisor in major trouble with the SEC. She also has a sporting apparel company. She hired an SEO, Pierson, to improve the search engine indexing of her website. After a payment dispute, Pierson posted a blog post that starts out “DJ Bennett, the luxury sporting goods company, does not pay their employees or contractors.” Bennett demanded Google de-index the blog post, and then sued Google for defamation and more when it didn’t.

One factual ambiguity that crept into the appellate opinion: The appellate opinion discusses Blogger’s “Content Policy.” However, I believe the post resided only on Pierson’s theexecutiveseo.com domain, not on the Blogger platform. Therefore, I think this is really a search engine de-indexing case, not a blog hosting case.

The district court ruled for Google. In a brief opinion, the DC Circuit affirmed.

Case Citation: Bennett v. Google, LLC, 2018 WL 1021235 (D.C. Cir. Feb. 23, 2018)

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For the past year, I’ve been covering Congress’ efforts to create a sex trafficking exception to Section 230’s immunity. From the beginning, it was clear that the proponents did not understand Section 230’s powerful but counter-intuitive doctrinal mechanisms, yet their initiative to gut Section 230 had momentum. Two bills were introduced: SESTA in the Senate and FOSTA in the House. Both bills as introduced were terrible.

After a Senate Commerce Committee hearing, SESTA was amended to fix some of its roughest edges, but the amendments didn’t resolve SESTA’s structural flaw (I’ll discuss that below). As part of a House Judiciary Committee hearing, FOSTA as introduced was replaced by substitute FOSTA, which still had problems but represented a more productive approach to address sex trafficking. Amended SESTA and substitute FOSTA passed the Senate Commerce Committee and House Judiciary Committee, respectively, queuing both up for passage by their respective chambers. However, amended SESTA has been slowed by Sen. Wyden’s hold; and for reasons that aren’t clear to me, the House Judiciary Committee didn’t report substitute FOSTA until last week. Ten days ago, the House Energy & Commerce Committee waived jurisdiction over FOSTA to help get the bill on the House floor.

Ever since substitute FOSTA emerged, one of the key questions has been how Senate and House might reconcile the different policy approaches in SESTA and FOSTA if both advanced. No one I spoke to, not even the inside-Congress experts, were confident in their predictions. Last week, a backroom deal was announced that apparently answers that question, but in substantively and procedurally deficient ways. This is BAD NEWS.

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Tech dirt
[retrieved 2-27-18]

A week or so back, we discussed the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE) calling on the Copyright Office to extend exemptions to anti-circumvention in the DMCA to organizations looking to curate and preserve online games. Any reading of stories covering this idea needs to be grounded in the understanding that the Librarian of Congress has already extended these same exemptions to video games that are not online multiplayer games. Games of this sort are art, after all, and exemptions to the anti-circumvention laws allow museums, libraries, and others to preserve and display older games that may not natively run on current technology, or those that have been largely lost in terms of physical product. MADE’s argument is that online multiplayer games are every bit the art that these single-player games are and deserve preservation as well.

Well, the Entertainment Software Association, an industry group that largely stumps for the largest gaming studios and publishers in the industry, has come out in opposition to preserving online games, arguing that such preservation is a threat to the industry.

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Heather Smith-Carra
February 21, 2018

IP Watchdog

On February 1, 2018, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit issued a decision in the case, BMG Rights Management LLC v. Cox Communications, Inc. The Fourth Circuit affirmed in part the district court’s granting of summary judgment to BMG on the § 512(a) Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) safe harbor defense. Ultimately, the Fourth Circuit agreed with the district court’s decision that Cox was not entitled to the safe harbor defense, finding that Cox’s 13-strike policy for repeat infringers was effectively no policy at all, and far less than the termination policy required in order to maintain safe harbor protections.

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Last year we wrote about a bizarre and troubling DMCA case involving the print-on-demand company Zazzle, in which the judge in the district court bizarrely and wrongly claimed that Zazzle lost its DMCA safe harbors because the allegedly infringing works were printed on a t-shirt, rather than remaining digitally (even though it was the end user using the infringing work, and Zazzle’s system just processed it automatically). To add insult to injury, in November, the judge then issued a permanent injunction against Zazzle for this infringement.

However, it appears that no one is more troubled about this permanent injunction issued by Judge Stephen Wilson… than Judge Stephen Wilson.

In early February, Wilson released a new order reversing his earlier order and chastising himself for getting things wrong.

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The content in this post was found at https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180216/11245139250/court-realizes-it-totally-screwed-up-injunction-against-zazzle-copyright-infringement.shtml Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post. and was not authored by the moderators of privacynnewmedia.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.