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Mom Sues Music Company Over Baby Video Removal
penguin_dance writes "A Pennsylvania mom is fighting back, suing Universal Music Publishing Group for having a home movie taken down off of YouTube. The movie, featuring her 18-month old bouncing to Prince's song, 'Let's Go Crazy,' was cited for removal by the Group for copyright infringement. Mom Stephanie Lenz was first afraid they'd come after her — then she got angry. She got YouTube to put the video back up, she's enlisted the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and she's filed a civil lawsuit (pdf). 'I thought even though I didn't do anything wrong that they might want to file some kind of suit against me, take my house, come after me. And I didn't like feeling afraid ... I didn't like feeling that I could get in trouble for something as simple as posting a home video for my friends and family to see.'"
Does that mean you can go right in and hold em up for cash?
Actually, as a matter of fact, it does. Else the EFF wouldn't have taken the case. The EFF may not be perfect, but they damn sure aren't going around wasting cash.
P.S.: Seriously, RTFA.
EFF Victories
With their pretty long list of cases listed here perhaps you could go through and point out out the hundreds listed, which ones they lost. If they have a track record of losing, I'm sure it won't take long to point out a few dozen cases the lost out of the hundred+ listed. I'd love to be more informed, but I suspect you probably have a couple headlines stuck in your head and are overgeneralizing.
I wish there was a fscking blue pill
There ain't any, none. Them harassing her is crap. Radio stations all over play 30 second and under bumper music clips for *free*. Been like that for a long long time. She got a 29 second clip, she can tell them to go pound sand. The judge will, too. I certainly hope they file notice with those bozo lawyer's bar association, she might have some serious damages coming and they could even be disbarred, because if IP law is their specialty, they will have known this in advance. She's gonna pwn them greedsters.
Brilliant. One thing you should add, however, is a willingness to pay a small fee for the permission. Surely that's reasonable.
Of course, if they decide they don't want to take your money because you're small potatoes, it's obviously ironic if they decide to pay a ton of money to lawyers, to sue people over equally small potatoes. But it'd be nice if there were a way to codify that irony into law. That is... unless there's a reasonable means for people to request and receive permission to use copyrighted works, then the RIAA can't sue those small potatoes either. Of course, current copyright law says that it's well within a copyright holder's right to withhold their work for any reason. However, copyright is hopefully shifting towards somewhat more permissive rules these days. And if it does shift that way, hopefully one of the first things to shift would be that if a copyright holder distributes tens of millions of copies of a work, that they can hardly expect the teeming masses to not want to at least minimally interact with that work, and that such a proposal might be reasonable for widely-distributed works.
I found it funny in the video attached to the article that the ABC commentators mentioned that before this dust-up, only about 20-30 people saw the video (mainly family members). After this story broke, it has received THOUSANDS of hits (i.e Streisand effect).....so once again, big music shot itself in the foot....
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
This isn't about "sue me first. sue you first" this is about the fact that due to RIAA's litigation-happy activities, she was essentially terrorized and intimidated. She was very. very afraid. Who is to blame for that fear and intimidation? The RIAA. Now, for that baseless fear and intimidation, she is going to sue for damages caused.
There are likely to be many precedents where unfounded fear and intimidation had resulted in damages being awarded by the courts. Her fears are not unwarranted and I believe the will be victorious in this case.