DMCA

If your hosting service or other online service provider receives a DMCA takedown notice regarding your content, it ordinarily will respond by removing the complained-of material, and it will do this automatically without making any judgment about whether your content actually is infringing. However, the DMCA notice-and-takedown procedures provide you with protection from a wrongful claim of copyright infringement. The DMCA requires your service provider to notify you promptly when it removes any of your content because of a takedown notice, and you have the right to submit a counter-notice asking that the material be put back up. There is no specific time limit for submitting a counter-notice, but you should not delay unreasonably in doing so. If you send a counter-notice, your online service provider is required to replace the disputed content unless the complaining party sues you within fourteen business days of your sending the counter-notice. (Your service provider may replace the disputed material after ten business days if the complaining party has not filed a lawsuit, but it is required to replace it within fourteen business days.)   read more »


Tagged with

Last updated on May 8th, 2008

Often, the best strategy for dealing with speech you do not like is through more speech, rather than resorting to threats of legal action. In some situations, however, more speech may do little good, such as when someone copies your work and publishes it on another website without permission. For instance, a recent post on MediaShift's Idea Lab blog asks "How Do We Deal With Stolen Content?". In that post, Gail Robinson, the editor-in-chief of Gotham Gazette, relates how the Gazette's technical director has found many sites reprinting the full text of Gazette articles without permission, often using them with little or no attribution and sometimes even making the articles look like original material. This post prompted us to think about strategies for citizen media creators to protect their online work from copyright infringement. The law provides you with several tools for protecting your work, including sending DMCA takedown notices to online service providers that host websites or blogs that copy your work. Despite the potential usefulness of these tools, it is important to use them judiciously to protect your rights without unduly chilling the speech of others.   read more »


Tagged with

Last updated on May 8th, 2008

You may come across digital works that contain copyright controls, such as digital rights management (DRM) technology or a software copy protection system. As a general matter, you should not circumvent these copyright controls, or you may face civil and criminal penalties under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Some copyright owners embed a form of DRM into their digital work in order to control its use and distribution. Typically, copyright controls come in two flavors:

  1. access-control measures designed to keep you from accessing the work; and
  2. copy-control measures that limit what you can do with the work after you have access (e.g., whether you can copy the work, how many copies can be made, how long you can have possesion of the work, and the like).

The DMCA prohibits circumventing access-control measures. 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1). For example, if you cannot watch a particular copyrighted DVD on your laptop because of an encryption system, the DMCA makes it unlawful for you to bypass this access-control measure. Access-control measures may also be found on eBooks, Internet streaming platforms, and password-protected sections of websites, among other things. Note that there is no ban on the act of circumventing copy-control measures, but it is illegal for anyone to provide you with the technological tools to do so. In any event, some copyright holders merge access-control and copy-control measures in the same DRM system, making it impossible to circumvent copy-controls (which is not prohibited) without circumventing access-controls (which is prohibited).   read more »


Tagged with

Last updated on May 9th, 2008

Last updated on April 24th, 2008

Air Force DMCA-Bombs YouTubed Ad

Posted March 8th, 2008 by Wendy Seltzer

Over at Wired's Threat Level blog, Kevin Poulsen reports on a new DMCA overreach: the U.S. Air Force complained (via outside counsel) about his posting of their recruiting video. The post, Poulsen says, was initially made at the Air Force's invitation.

If the government created this work, then the DMCA claim is improper. Works of the U.S. government are not copyrightable. But the statute allows the government to receive copyright assignments, so if an independent contractor created the video, still available at the Air Force's (non .mil) site, the government could meet that technical requisite of the DMCA.

The DMCA also requires that the notifier assert the posting was unauthorized. Poulsen's article, however, says the Air Force sent Wired the ad and "thanked THREAT LEVEL for agreeing to run it." That doesn't quite square with the DMCA-required statement that the notice-sender "ha[s] a good faith belief that none of the materials or activities listed above has been authorized by the U.S. Air Force, its agents, or the law."

Even if the Air Force's DMCA claim is truthful, however, it's still a policy overreach. Wired posted the video in order to report on government recruiting efforts; the video's dissemination is part of that First-Amendment protected discussion, whether it happens on or off government websites. The DMCA makes it too easy to takedown first, think later.

Bookmark/Search this post with:
in

Last updated on April 23rd, 2008

YouTube Removes “Shred” Parody Videos; WIRED Puts Them Back Up

Posted February 29th, 2008 by Matt C. Sanchez

Earlier this month, some of the most creative and entertaining parody videos on the Web were pulled from YouTube over dubious copyright claims. The disputed works, known as the “shred” videos, are a series of parodies in which Finnish media artist Santeri Ojala overdubs performances of legendary guitarists such as Steve Vai, Carlos Santana, and Eric Clapton. Ojala replaces the audio tracks of the guitarists' performances with his own (intentionally) bad guitar playing.

Because Ojala is a skilled guitar player himself, the horrific sounds match closely with the guitar hero's hand and finger movements, which makes the videos that much more surreal. Other rock stars unwary enough to enter the screen during the guitarists' performances get similar treatment – in one notable clip, Ozzy Osbourne's clapping to the beat is reduced to a rhythmless patter that wouldn't have cut it in a backyard birthday celebration, much less a rock show.   read more »

Bookmark/Search this post with:
in

Last updated on April 23rd, 2008

Last updated on April 15th, 2008

Last updated on April 18th, 2008

12345next ›last »
  
 
 
Copyright 2008 Citizen Media Law Project and respective authors. Except where otherwise noted,
content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License: Details.
Use of this site is pursuant to our Terms of Use and Privacy Notice.