Star Wars Rekindles Old Copyright Hassles

Roast Beef wrote in to send us a news.com article about Lucasfilm's form letter to ISPs. Somewhat related to the recent story about Bootleg Movies for Download, but it boils down to the age old "Are ISPs responsible for the content on their servers" debate.

Comments

Again, overreaction...

[Masem]

First, Lucas himself probably has very little to
do with this (he's reportedly going to make
a cool billion based off his initial contract
with 20CF and the movie sales (he's getting 90%
of the profits)). If anything, this is most
likely Lucasfilms in general, and if more specific,
the lawfirm hired.

Also, read the story: LucasArts is trying to warn
the ISPs that if they (the ISPs) let SW:TPM
electronic media through their lines, LA will
follow up with lawsuits. This is against the
nature of the law recently passed by the US
Gov't that says that ISPs are not responsible
for media served by their customers. Many
analaysts are saying that this letter is
a bullying tactic, and that ISPs do not need
to heed it's warning, because LA does not
have a leg to stand on.

My expectation is that the larger ISPs (AOL,
Earthlink, etc) will seek legal help, then
release a press release or a rebuttal against
the letter, stating their freedom from
prosecution by this law. There will be a bit
of word battles to resolve this, but in the end,
LA will back off (I hope). However, I suspect
that LA will launch (if not already in progress)
a large campaign to block the distrubution of
electronic media of SW:TPM related stuff, and
this will be rather strong if the ISP route
fails.

Mind you, I disagree that piracy and bootlegging
are answers to Evil Corporate Clones. LA has
every right to protect their IP on the net.
On the other hand, a smart Hollywood company
would think that releasing offical snippets and singles in electronic form to satisfy the pallete of fans out there is a Good Move; this is
basically free advertizing for them. If you
feel you must protest this action by LA, write
letters instead of pirating the (expected)
MPEG movie from someone's camcorder used on
May 19th.

Bad move

[dattaway]

I'm not going to be a customer to a coorporation or polititions that actively attempt to destroy the internet. It was the Clinton administration, RIAA, and now Lucasfilm... Did I miss anyone? Who's next?

Just and idle threat.

[richnut]

Lawyers send threatening letters to ISP's all the time, and most of the time they are threats which have little basis in law and are designed to frighten ISP's into caving. ISP's are very afraid of lawyers because the laws and precedents are not always clear, and litigation is expensive and time consuming for a small business. OTOH a good lawyer will make quick work of something like Lucas's letter which has dubious basis in law and is just trying to spread fear.

-Rich

How much are international routes used anyway

[Fizgig]

I can't imagine that the international FTP sites are going to be that bad anyway. How quickly can anyone, even at a university, download a VCD of the thing from over the ocean? There's no way any ISP is going to blacklist certain international routes, and that's not what the lawyers should go after. Just trying to connect to those site .fr web sites makes me want to hit the computer, it's so slow. And I'm sure the lawyers can get most of the industrialized nations to respect their copyrights by scaring those ISPs. The countries which don't respect our copyright law are the ones with pathetic Internet connections, so it's not going to matter that much anyway.

The actual form letter

[HerbieTMac]

This is the actual letter which we received here at the University of Chicago. As you can read, they are a bit too gung-ho about things.

What are they? Bartenders?

[blacklambda]

In Pennsylvania, where I live, bartenders are held liable if someone they serve goes out and causes an accident. This is a stupid law, but it shows that ISP's might be treated the same way. I don't think it is the ISP's responsability anymore then the Post Office should be held liable for illegal materials sent through it's system.

DMCA Likely Saves the Day

[werdna]

Title II of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act squarely confronts the issues raised here by Lucasfilm. Essentially, a qualified service provider is not responsible for copyright infringement by its subscribers under many conditions.

One way a copyright owner can pierce the safe harbor is by sending notice of an infringement to the ISP, under certain conditions. This is what this letter is about. There is a laundry list of details setting forth what constitutes a notice that would serve this purpose. In particular, to be effective, the notification must identify particular works "at that site" and information "reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to locate the material."

In short, the notice appears intended to be used as a notice of an actual infringement, and not as a blanket, preemptive device to "turn off" the ISP immunity for a given list of works. Clearly the Lucaslawyers are trying to test the limits of the law, or (more likely IMHO) are merely setting up later cases in an abundance of caution. ["Yer honah, we notified them and notified them and notified them a whole buncha' times, but they didn't do nothin'"]

The notice Lucasfilms presents does not appear to qualify, since it is a notice of potential infringements, and not a notice of an actual, present infringement. Here, Lucasfilms is attempting to use something like the notice to effectively "deputize" the world's ISP community as copyright police.

This is probably impermissible. In particular, the DMCA provides that: "Nothing in this section shall be construed to condition the applicability of [the exemption] on-- (1) a service provider monitoring its service or affirmatively seeking facts indicating infringing activity" provided that the ISP accomodates and does not interfere with "standard technical measures."

Of course, once there *is* an infringement, and once Lucas actually gives notice, that is another issue.

While I am a lawyer, readers should note that the preceding is merely a general summary of a few provisions of the DMCA and should not be deemed legal advice. Legal advice requires application of particular law to particular facts and in DMCA cases, the devil is certainly in the details and particular facts can make the case swing either way. Please forgive the multi-line disclaimer -- my carrier insists upon this sort of thing.