Universal and MySpace Square Off Over DMCA

moore.dustin writes "Universal and MySpace look to be on a collision course that could shape the future of media companies and the internet. The article discusses the DMCA's impact on their case, and talks ways in which the law lags behind the realities of technology." From the article: "Yet, as lawyers prepare for battle, they do so on uncertain legal ground. The legislation at the heart of the debate, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, was written years before social networking sites such as MySpace even existed. That fact has injected considerable uncertainty into the matter, according to copyright experts, and helps explain why lawyers from both sides are proclaiming that the DMCA, as it is known, is on their side."

Comments

The Universally Flawed Argument

[Slipgrid]

Last month Universal accused MySpace of infringing its copyrights by allowing its customers to post music videos from artists such as Jay-Z on the site without permission.

The basis of their argument is that they are allowing users to post Jay-Z videos, just like I'm sure they allow Universal to request there deletion. The gun manufactures tried this argument before. Guns allow people to kill each other. They also allow people to protect themselves. Allowing a crime is far from facilitating it. Myspace, sucks as it does, provides many with legal entertainment. Just because a few are able to abuse the system, doesn't mean that Rupt owes Univ a tax.

The case

[Rob T Firefly]

For the lazy, the case in TFA involves Universal accusing MySpace of copyright infringement based on the ability of its users to post copyrighted music videos to the site without permission.

Precisely what the DMCA was enacted for

[michaelmalak]

Contrary to what the analysts and lawyers in the ft.com article are blathering about, this is precisely the motivation behind the DMCA. In 1998, four years after the start of the Internet's meteroic rise, the media publishers had a vague fear that the Internet would bring new ways for people to make perfect copies of their publications. Thus they attacked preemptively by paying Congress to enact the DMCA. The media companies of course did not know P2P and "social networking" by name, but they knew from the Internet's growth (in size and technology) that such then-unknown things would come about. Heck, the violations were already occurring via UseNet.

While a lot of aspects of copyright are detestable -- such as the DMCA's prohibition against format shifting and the extension into perpetuity of copyrights, if the DMCA makes a special exemption for "common carriers" like MySpace (whose main purpose is social networking, not copyright infringement), then that is a good provision of the DMCA -- and it would be a farsighted one based on then-existing technologies such as UseNet, not a provision created in the "different world of 1998" as the ft.com article asserts.

If Universal wins, /. closes

[Per Abrahamsen]

If universal wins, a "get rich fast" scheme would be:

1) Create and sell copyrightable junk on e.g. www.lulu.com for an inflated price.
2) Post it as an Anonymous Coward on /.
3) Sue /. for copyright infrigement for profit!

A win for Universal would mean all user generated content on all sites would have to be pre-approved, which would be economically infeasible for most hobbyist or ad-based sites. Control of the information stream would fall back in the hands of a few large media companies, and most of the democratic potential of the Internet would be lost.