Video-sharing website Vimeo LLC cannot be held liable for copyright infringement for unknowingly hosting older music (pre-1972) uploaded by its users. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York held that the safe harbors provided by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) protect qualifying website operators from liability from such pre-1972 recordings, even though they are not covered by federal copyright law. The Court also held that the mere fact that Vimeo employees had viewed videos with copyrighted sound recordings was not enough to prove the company ignored red flags of infringement.
(1) The Sheriff of Cook County, Illinois in an attempt to shut down Backpage.com’s advertising of sexual services sent a letter to Visa and MasterCard, demanding the companies to "immediately cease and desist from allowing . . . credit cards to be used to place ads on websites like Backpage.com." Visa and MasterCard complied and refused to process credit card transactions to purchase any ads on the website, including those for other services. (2) Backpage then filed a preliminary injunction against the Sheriff, but it was denied by the Northern District Court of Illinois. (3) On appeal, Judge Posner from the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals found the Sheriff in violation of the website's First Amendment right through "threatened imposition of government power or sanction" in an attempt to stifle protected forms of speech...
(1) The Court gave some breathing space to creators of User-Generated Content (UGC) from bogus takedown notices in cases of blatant misrepresentation of fair use defences by copyright holders and held that “the statute requires copyright holders to consider fair use before sending take-down notification.” (2) The Court also recognised the possible applicability of section 512(f) of the DMCA that allows for the recognition of damages in case of proved bad-faith, which would occur if the copyright holder did not consider fair use or paid “lip service to the consideration of fair use by claiming it formed a good faith belief when there is evidence to the contrary.” However, the Court noted also that there’s no liability under § 512(f), “if, however, a copyright holder forms a subjective good faith belief the allegedly...
holding that “Aereo publicly performs copyrighted works, in violation of the Copyright Act’s Transmit Clause, when it sells its subscribers a technologically complex service that allows them to watch television programs over the Internet at about the same time as the programs are broadcast over the air.” However, the dissenting opinion argued that turning a secondary liability case into a direct liability case is a mistake and may work serious injury to the general public. Justice Scalia strongly objected to the majority view and noted that “Aereo does not perform at all. The Court manages to reach the opposite conclusion only by disregarding widely accepted rules for service-provider . . . liability and adopting in their place an improvised standard ("looks-like-cable-TV") that will sow confusion for years to come.”...
The footage of an actress' minor role in an unreleased adventure film titled “Desert Warrior”, was modified and incorporated into an anti-Islamic film titled the "Innocence of the Muslims", which was later uploaded to Youtube. The actress then received death threats from an Egyptian cleric. After Google refused to take it down from Youtube, plaintiff actress sought a restraining order seeking removal and that posting of the video infringed the copyright in her performance. 9th Circuit Judge Kozinski ruled for the actress, holding that she had an independent copyright interest in her performance (although filmmaker had an implied license to use her performance, the filmmaker exceeded the bounds of the license); and that the actress faced irreparable harm absent an injunction.
Capitol Records (CR), a record company, sued ReDigi, which operated an online marketplace for buying and selling pre-owned legally downloaded music, for copyright infringement regarding reproduction and distribution rights in sound recordings owned by CR. The Court held in favour of the plaintiff-copyright holder and rejected ReDigi’s “first sale” and “fair use” defenses. The Court sustained that Redigi's directly infringed CR's copyrights. In particular, the Court held that (1) ReDigi’s making unauthorized transfers of digital music files over the internet was reproduction and distribution for the purpose of copyright protection; (2) the “first sale” doctrine did not cover ReDigi’s distribution of CR’s copyrighted works; (3) ReDigi was also liable for contributory infringement and vicarious infringement of CR’s...