Free for a Fee

By Eric Goldman

Perfect 10, Inc. v. Google, Inc., 2:04-cv-09484-AHM-SH (C.D. Cal. July 26, 2010)

In 2007, the Ninth Circuit issued an important but befuddling ruling in Perfect 10 v. Amazon and Google. That ruling addressed Perfect 10’s prima facie case of secondary copyright infringement against Google (and Amazon, which was using Google results) and remanded the case back to the district court for consideration of that issue as well as the underexplored 17 USC 512 safe harbors.

We’ve had a couple of blog-worthy rulings since then (on a motion to dismiss and A9’s eligibility for the DMCA safe harbors), but it’s taken 3 years to see where the court stands on Google’s eligibility for the DMCA online safe harbors. The news is largely good for Google.

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The content in this post was found at http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2010/07/google_gets_sev.htm and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

The content in this post was found at http://jetl.wordpress.com/2010/06/25/google-defeats-viacoms-copyright-case-with-dmca-safe-harbor/ and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

Major movie studios have won yet another round against The Pirate Bay, this time cutting off one of the site’s chief ISPs, Cyberbunker.

The district court in Hamburg, Germany has issued an injunction against Cyberbunker and its owner, Sven Olaf Kamphuis, demanding that he cut off service to The Pirate Bay. Failure to do so will result in massive fines of €250,000 per act of online infringement, or up to two years in prison.

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The content in this post was found at http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/05/pirate-bay-isp-hit-with-german-injunction-must-stop-hosting.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

Who doesn’t enjoy a good old-fashioned mud-slingin’ showdown? That’s exactly what we’ve got on our hands in the dueling summary judgment motions from Viacom and YouTube in the long-running copyright infringement case (see my initial post from March 2007). While we might have some voyeuristic fun watching the sparks, the latest salvos prove that the parties are both losers for not finding a way to settle this case. Only the lawyers win when two heavyweight contenders get locked into a cosmic death struggle. Everyone else would be better off if Viacom and YouTube instead had poured their millions of dollars of legal fees towards developing innovative and profitable ways to serve consumers’ interests. It’s ridiculous that they can’t find a way to do this.

Combined together, the filings tell a “Tale of Two YouTubes.” Viacom focuses on YouTube of Yore, circa 2005-06, while YouTube’s brief largely focuses on YouTube of Now. In that sense, the briefs largely talked past each other.

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The content in this post was found at http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2010/03/viacom_v_youtub.htmand was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

One of the most recent Internet meme trends has been to launch a site of ridiculous, funny, or awkward photos of things and people that are otherwise found in everyday life. You’re probably familiar with some of them: People of Walmart, LATFH, Awkward Family Photos, Regretsy, and so on. Usually these sites become so virally popular that they end up getting book deals, but that’s not the case for one such site. Awkward Stock Photos, a site that featured some of the more questionable pictures found in stock photo databases, received a DMCA notice for the contents of its entire site, despite the fact that it removed no watermarks, linked back to the original stock photo page, and made no money off the venture.

The content in this post was found at http://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/BAaf and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.