EFF To Ask Judge To Rule That Universal Abused the DMCA

xSander writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will urge a federal judge in San Jose, CA to rule that Universal abused the DMCA to take down a video of a toddler dancing to a Prince song. The case in question, whose oral argument will be Tuesday, October 16, is Stephanie Lenz vs. Universal, a case that began back in 2007. Lenz shared a video on YouTube of her son dancing to 'Let's Go Crazy' on a stereo in the background. After Universal took the video down, Lenz filed a suit with help of the EFF to hold Universal accountable for taking down her fair use. The court had already decided that content owners must consider fair use before sending copyright takedown notices."

Comments

Re:Meh

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

If you actually think of yourself as having a 'personal brand', I'd say that existing is all the punishment you could ever require...

Re:I'm still not clear on how such takedowns...

[Nidi62]

I think the idea is that the DMCA is supposedly only invoked in good faith, and that it would only be used in cases where their is a clear copyright violation. If this were the case, then I think most people would consider the DMCA a relatively fair and benign method of copyright protection. The problem is that it is not being used in good faith. Rather, it is being thrown at virtually everything to see what it sticks on, and it's so sticky it sticks to everything. So, to answer your question, I don't think it was intended (except, of course, by it's industry backers) to be used this way.

I'd like to see more of this

[v1]

We need more of these trigger-happy infringement notice filers to be held accountable. I get the impression that at this point they feel they can do no wrong, and will just fire off a takedown notice with no thought to the consequences. They need to learn that we won't stand for their abuse of the system.

Applying some of the teeth in the anti-abuse clause in the DMCA is the only way to change their attitude. These groups won't stop abusing the system until it starts affecting their bottom line.

(of all the things I've seen the EFF do lately, this is the one that I appreciate the most)

Re:I'd like to see more of this

[ender8282]

Oooh, Oooh how about 3 strikes. The media companies love it so much; what if they got 3 strikes? If they issue 3 DMCA take down requests that get overturned as failing to consider fair use, they loose the right to issue take down requests.

I predict that a fraction of a second after such a law took affect most companies' bots would issue bad requests. A few months later the courts would rule that 3 of them were in valid, and all of big name rights owners would loose the right to issue take down notices. Then the word becomes a better place and I can watch the Curiosity landing!

Re:Meh

[Elbereth]

This whole problem could be resolved easily if the corporations had an automated system wherein people could license copyrighted works for use in personal, noncommercial videos (like YouTube). It wouldn't necessarily have to even cost any money, either. Simply collecting demographics would, I imagine, be valuable to the suits. If they wanted to be complete and utter assholes about it, they could charge 10 cents per license (or maybe have an unlimited subscription service for $5/month, so that you could use any of their hottest singles).

As it stands, people have no way to ask for permission and thus resort to simply violating copyright. If they at least had the opportunity to follow the law, maybe there wouldn't be so much ill will toward the suits.

This seems like quite a reasonable compromise to me.