Another copyright item: YouTube turned over user data to Viacom’s Paramount Pictures after the studio persuaded a federal judge to issue a subpoena requiring the site to fork over details about a user that had uploaded dialog from the movie “Twin Towers.” YouTube complied, and on June 16 Paramount sued the maker of the 12-minute uploaded video, Chris Moukarbel, for copyright infringement, in federal court in Washington.
The total capitulation on the part of YouTube seems, at first blush, a complete departure from the philosophy of Google, soon to be YouTube’s new corporate parent.
“YouTube seems to have given up too easily,” said Laurence P. Colton, an intellectual-property lawyer at the firm of Powell & Goldstein LLP in Atlanta.
Earlier this year, Google successfully fought a Justice Department subpoena that it turn over massive amounts of search data needed for a quantitative analysis designed to support an Administration legislative effort.
However, in the case of YouTube’s quick consent to the Viacom-spurred subpoena, the Government wasn’t asking and the amount of data sought was limited…to one individual. There weren’t too many arguments in YouTube’s arsenal to fight an order by a federal judge to help a copyright holder identify an infringer.
Still, it’s not a comforting development and it’s a signal, as if one were needed, that YouTube is now part of the Internet establishment, less the renegade and more the likely defendant in scattered legal actions. Moukarbel ultimately settled with YouTube, but sounds wistful about the good old days (say nine months or so ago) when YouTube was wild and woolly.
“I was happy to utilize YouTube when it was still not clearly established. It felt a bit utopian, even though the days for that were clearly numbered,” Moukarbel said.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:01 PM | Print | Comments (0)
A string of developments has coalesced in my mind today to underscore the unstable nature of intellectual property law on the Internet, where old rules don’t seem to apply but nobody really knows what the new rules are. The first item: YouTube has complied with a take-down request by a group of Japanese media companies, which claimed that 29,549 media clips were posted on the popular site without the copyright holders’ permission.
That seems like a straightforward development governed by the Digital Millennim Copyright Act, except comentators view this development as a harbinger of things to come. Good Morning Silicon Valley’s John Paczkowski quotes Forrester analyst-on-the-spot Josh Bernoff, who earlier this year said “So, mark my words, YouTube will get sued. And it will lose.”
Maybe…but how can YouTube get sued and lose if it’s obeying the law by taking down requested content? Easy. Someone is going to challenge the DMCA because it doesn’t seem to fit the real-world anymore. So it’s the law that’s the problem and not YouTube’s compliance with the law.
Mike at TechDirt rips into CNET’s Charles Cooper for an essay Cooper wrote which suggests Google is engaging in “immoral” behavior for making money off of other people’s copyrighted content. Cooper thinks we should all be talking about the legality of Google’s links while Mike at TechDirt thinks Cooper is, at the minimum, just jealous of Google’s success.
On the permission side, the second you put something up on the web without any protections or logins, you are giving permission to have that content visited and for people to point to it. There’s no copyright violation at all in including a blurb.
Finally, Eric Goldman at the Technology and Marketing Law Blog hits on something that doesn’t receive a lot of press, but should: the law is very unsettled regarding the trademark status of the key words advertisers use for Google searches.
2006 has been a bit of a jurisprudential disaster on the question of whether buying/selling keywords constitutes a trademark use in commerce. Basically, courts can’t agree, so plaintiffs and defendants are trading wins—sequentially by date, the answer to whether keyword advertising is a use in commerce has been yes (Edina), no (Merck), yes (800-JR Cigar), no (Rescuecom) and yes (Buying for the Home). At least we have a predictable pattern emerging (consistent with the pattern, the next case should be a “no”)…but the alternating pattern is hardly confidence inspiring.
Although all three of these issues cover different aspects of intellectual property law, they all highlight how terrifically difficult it is anymore to make concrete statements about copyright or trademark infringement on the Internet. Even something as solidly legal as Google’s caching of content and delivery of search-produced links isn’t as inviolable as you might think, at least not globally anyway (just ask the Belgians).
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:00 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Blogs We Read
