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In what could be an upset to the media companies use of automated DMCA takedowns the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Monday that copyright holders must consider fair use before demanding companies such as YouTube remove potentially infringing content and can be liable for damages if they do not.
The three-judge panel on the court determined Stephanie Lenz, who posted a YouTube video of her child dancing to a Prince song in 2007, could proceed with her lawsuit seeking damages from Universal Music Corp., which pressed YouTube to remove the video under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). "We hold that the statute requires copyright holders to consider fair use before sending a takedown notification, and that failure to do so raises a triable issue as to whether the copyright holder formed a subjective good faith belief that the use was not authorized by law," according to the majority opinion.
It's not completely clear cut and dried however, as the court found that "the implementation of computer algorithms appears to be a valid and good faith middle ground for processing a plethora of content while still meeting the DMCA's requirements to somehow consider fair use." It speculated about a model in which a company sets up a computer program to send automatic takedown notices for content it identifies as nearly identical to copyrighted work, while a backup process uses humans to manually review other content that the computer program identified with less certainty.
While an appeal is probably inevitable, could this possibly be some light at the end of the tunnel for some of the overreaching and abusive use of the DMCA to take down non-infringing and fair use content?
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Wednesday September 16 2015, @06:39PM
A teacher copying a book and then selling those copies to his students for a profit (as opposed to simply recovering his cost) should still be liable for copyright infringement, even though those copies are for educational use.
No, since the very concept of copyright is flawed, since it seems to assume that lack of gain is harm, even though that is not true. Furthermore, enforcing copyright ultimately requires government censorship, which is completely intolerable and also unconstitutional. These companies will simply have to find a different business model or die off. That's what would happen in any sane society that actually cared one bit about freedom, instead of pretending to.
Also, plagiarism of educational material (also a form of copyright violation) should still be disallowed.
Since the purpose of school assignments is supposed to be education, school policies could take care of this. Fail the students who copy others' work and call it their own. We don't need copyright for this.