Grooveshark employees are guilty of copyright infringement, judge rules; Guardian, 9/30/14

Samuel Gibbs, Guardian; Grooveshark employees are guilty of copyright infringement, judge rules:

"Griesa pointed to an internal memo sent in 2007 where Greenberg asked employees to “please share as much music as possible from outside the office” to help the service get off the ground.

“By overtly instructing its employees to upload as many files as possible to Grooveshark as a condition of their employment, Escape engaged in purposeful conduct with a manifest intent to foster copyright infringement via the Grooveshark service,” Griesa wrote.

Griesa gave the parties 21 days to reach agreement to stop further infringement.

“Escape respectfully disagrees with the court’s decision, and is currently assessing its next steps, including the possibility of an appeal,” John Rosenberg, a partner at Rosenberg & Giger representing the defendants told Reuters.

The ruling opens the door to a multimillion-pound damages suit from the record labels, who are keen to see the service shut down, calling it a “linear descendant” of file sharing services Grokster, LimeWire and Napster all of whom have been shutdown over copyright infringement."

4chan website introduces copyright mechanism after celebrity hacking; Guardian, 9/4/14

Alex Hern, Guardian; 4chan website introduces copyright mechanism after celebrity hacking:

"Internet image board 4chan has introduced a policy for complying with the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for the first time.

The site was the place where hundreds of naked selfies stolen from celebrities including actors Jennifer Lawrence and Mary Elizabeth Winstead were posted.

The policy sets out for the first time a procedure by which copyright holders can send a DMCA takedown notice to the site’s administrators. These inform a website hosting user-generated content that one of their users has uploaded copyrighted material illegally, telling them to take down the relevant content or face legal action.

A DMCA policy is important in helping a site gain “safe harbour” protection from lawsuits, deflecting responsibility for user-generated content that it has not explicitly approved.

4chan has named a DMCA agent for the first time and offers a postal address in Delaware – apparently a box at a professional services firm.

Up until now, 4chan has been relatively well shielded from the consequences of the DMCA because of the ephemerality of the site. Although almost every post on 4chan involves an image, most of which are not licensed for use, most posts are deleted within a few hours of creation because the site trims any board bigger than ten pages."

Hotfile forks over $80 million to settle MPAA copyright suit; CNet, 12/3/13

Dara Kerr, CNet; Hotfile forks over $80 million to settle MPAA copyright suit: "Hotfile agreed on Tuesday to pay $80 million to settle a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by the Motion Picture Association of America. It was also ordered to cease all operations unless it instituted "digital fingerprinting" copyright filtering technology... Not all cyberlockers have been deemed unlawful, however. In fact, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's safe harbor protects online services as long as they obey some rules."

Artist who sued Twitter over copyright declares victory—via settlement; ArsTechnica.com, 11/2/12

Jon Brodkin, ArsTechnica.com; Artist who sued Twitter over copyright declares victory—via settlement: "Two months ago, an artist named Christopher Boffoli sued Twitter for copyright infringement because, he said, the company refused to take down copies of his artwork uploaded to Twitter by its users. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, sites like Twitter are granted a "safe harbor" against prosecution as long as they take copyrighted content down when they are notified of its existence. Boffoli, who made a popular series of photographs of miniature figures posed on and near food, sent Twitter numerous requests to take his artwork off the site, and many of them were ignored..."The matter was settled amicably out of court and I'm pleased to say that we had a productive conversation about copyright, and that I'm satisfied with the outcome," Boffoli told Ars via e-mail."

Viacom Loses To YouTube In Landmark Copyright Case; HuffingtonPost.com, 6/23/10

Michael Liedtke, AP via HuffingtonPost.com; Viacom Loses To YouTube In Landmark Copyright Case:

"A federal judge handed Google Inc. a major victory Wednesday by rebuffing media company Viacom Inc.'s attempt to collect more than $1 billion in damages for the alleged copyright abuses of Google's popular YouTube service.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton in New York embraces Google's interpretation of a 12-year-old law that shields Internet services from claims of copyright infringement as long as they promptly remove illegal content when notified of a violation.

That so-called "safe harbor" helped persuade Google to buy YouTube for $1.76 billion in 2006, even though some of the Internet search leader's own executives had earlier branded the video-sharing service as "a 'rogue enabler' of content theft," according to documents unearthed in the copyright infringement case.

Stanton "blessed the current state of play on the Internet," said Eric Goldman, a Santa Clara University associate professor who specializes in high-tech law. The affirmation was cheered by Internet service providers and free-speech groups who believe the Digital Millennium Copyright Act helps give more people an outlet to express themselves.

"Without this decision, user-generated content would dry up and the Internet would cease to be a participatory medium," said David Sohn, a lawyer for the Center for Democracy & Technology."

Viacom, the owner of popular cable channels such as MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, called Stanton's decision "fundamentally flawed" and vowed to appeal. That virtually ensures a legal brawl that already has dragged on for more than three years will spill into 2011 and perhaps beyond.

"Copyright protection is essential to the survival of creative industries," said Michael Fricklas, Viacom's general counsel. "It is and should be illegal for companies to build their businesses with creative material they have stolen from others."

The bitter battle revolves around Viacom's allegations that YouTube built itself into the Internet's most watched video site by milking unlicensed use of copyright-protected clips stolen from professionally produced show such as Viacom's "The Colbert Report" and "The Daily Show."

The pirated material came from the millions of people who have uploaded clips to YouTube since its 2005 inception. About 24 hours of new video is posted to YouTube every minute.

YouTube's whirlwind success led to the Google sale that generated huge windfalls for the video channel's founders, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim.

Citing e-mail exchanges among those founders, Viacom depicted the founders and other YouTube employees as video pirates who were more interested in getting rich quick than adhering to copyright laws.

But Stanton concluded YouTube's actions outweighed the words of the YouTube founders.

In dismissing the lawsuit before a trial, Stanton noted that Viacom had spent several months accumulating about 100,000 videos violating its copyright and then sent a mass takedown notice on Feb. 2, 2007. By the next business day, Stanton said, YouTube had removed virtually all of them.

Stanton said there's no dispute that "when YouTube was given the (takedown) notices, it removed the material."

Since it was sold to Google, YouTube has developed a system that helps flag copyright violations when videos are posted. Viacom argues those copyright detection tools prove YouTube could have done more to keep illegal content off its site.

Kent Walker, Google's general counsel, said the company is confident Stanton's decision will hold up. The 30-page ruling is "thoughtful, thorough and well-considered," Walker said in an interview. He also hailed the decision as "a victory for a new generation of creators and artists eager to showcase their work online," Walker said.

Facebook, eBay Inc. and Yahoo Inc. were among the Internet companies that had backed Google in its battle with Viacom.

The evidence that accumulated before Stanton reached his decision proved embarrassing for both sides.

An early e-mail exchange among Hurley, Chen and Karim showed at least one of them may have knowingly violated copyrights as they posted video clips during the service's early stages.

"Jawed, please stop putting stolen videos on the site," Chen wrote in the July 19, 2005, e-mail. "We're going to have a tough time defending the fact that we're not liable for the copyrighted material on the site because we didn't put it up when one of the co-founders is blatantly stealing content from other sites and trying to get everyone to see it."

Other documents showed Viacom had hoped to buy YouTube before getting trumped by Google, making it seem as if the media company's later claims of copyright abuse may have been a case of sour grapes.

A July 2006 e-mail from Fricklas, Viacom's top lawyer, even disputed that YouTube was engaged in rampant copyright infringement. "Mostly YouTube behaves," Fricklas wrote."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/23/youtube-viacom-lawsuit-se_n_623256.html

YouTube to McCain: You Made Your DMCA Bed, Lie in It - Wired.com, 10/15/08

YouTube to McCain: You Made Your DMCA Bed, Lie in It:

"YouTube on Tuesday rebuffed a request from John McCain's presidential campaign to examine fair-use issues more carefully before yanking campaign videos in response to DMCA takedown notices.

"Lawyers and judges constantly disagree about what does and does not constitute fair-use," YouTube's general counsel Zahavah Levine wrote in a letter Tuesday...

McCain campaign general counsel Trevor Potter argued that several of the removed ads, which had used excerpts of television footage, fall under the four-factor doctrine of fair-use, and shouldn't have been removed...

"We look forward to working with Senator (or President) McCain on ways to combat abuse of the DMCA takedown process on YouTube, including by way of example, strengthening the fair-use doctrine, so that intermediaries like us can rely on this important doctrine with a measure of business certainty.""
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/10/youtube-to-mcca.html