As digital piracy shifts away from torrent downloads and towards unauthorized streaming and theft-based extortion, stakeholders from all parts of the creativity community are reassessing their efforts to fight online infringement. This week, a global coalition of creators and leading on-demand entertainment services joined forces to better address the ever-evolving threat that piracy poses not only to artists and copyright owners, but to consumers and end users. Read more
Category: Infringement
Explaining Efficient Infringement
By Adam Mossoff & Bhamati Viswanathan
In a recent New York Times op-ed, “The Patent Troll Smokescreen,” Joe Nocera used in print for the first time the term, “efficient infringement.” This pithy phrase quickly gained currency if only because it captures a well-known phenomenon that has been impossible to describe in even a single sentence. Read more
Content Thief Turned Content Creator Rails Against Piracy
Cross-posted from the Mister Copyright blog.
Last week, YouTube celebrity (yes, that’s a thing now) Olajide “JJ” Olatunji posted an expletive-filled tirade aimed at those illegally downloading his new movie “Laid in America.” After fans of Olatunji (aka KSI), whose YouTube page has over 14 million subscribers, began notifying him of the film’s availability on a number of illicit torrent sites, he lashed out at the people pirating the film, listing the many legal services offering his work, and explaining – in not so subtle terms – how illegally downloading the film hurts all who contributed to its creation. Read more
Criminal Copyright Infringement is Crime of "Moral Turpitude"
Cross-posted from the Law Theories blog.
This past Friday, the Board of Immigration Appeals held that criminal copyright infringement constitutes a “crime involving moral turpitude” under immigration law. The Board reasoned that criminal copyright infringement is inherently immoral because it involves the willful theft of property and causes harm to both the copyright owner and society. Read more
European Union Draws a Line on Infringing Hyperlinks
Cross-posted from the Mister Copyright blog.
Last week, the European Court of Justice—the judicial authority of the European Union—issued an anticipated decision in the Sanoma hyperlinking case, declaring that commercial linking with knowledge of unauthorized content constitutes copyright infringement. The opinion comes after years of similar cases in Europe stirred debate over whether linking to pirated works was a ‘communication to the public’ and therefore infringing, and provides a sensible test that protects the works of authors and creators while ensuring the internet remains a bastion of free speech. Read more
Despite What You Hear, Notice and Takedown is Failing Creators and Copyright Owners
In a recent op-ed in the LA Times, Professors Chris Sprigman and Mark Lemley praise the notice and takedown provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as “a bit of copyright law worth saving.” They argue that Section 512 of the DMCA continues to serve its purpose of balancing the rights of copyright owners and creators with those of Internet service providers (ISPs), while leaving both sides only “slightly disappointed.” Read more
Letter on FCC Set-Top Box Regulation Once Again Confuses the Issue
Last week, a group of law professors wrote a The Dangerous Combination of Content Theft and Malware
Cross-posted from the Mister Copyright blog.
Malware, short for malicious software, has been used to infiltrate and contaminate computers since the early 1980s. But what began as relatively benign software designed to prank and annoy users has developed into a variety of hostile programs intended to hijack, steal, extort, and attack. Read more
Three Years Later, DMCA Still Just as Broken
By Matthew Barblan & Kevin Madigan
In 2013, CPIP published a policy brief by Professor Bruce Boyden exposing the DMCA notice and takedown system as outdated and in need of reform. The Failure of the DMCA Notice and Takedown System explained that while Section 512 of the DMCA was intended as a way for copyright owners and service providers to work together to fight infringement in the digital age, the notice and takedown system has been largely ineffective in managing the ever-increasing amount of piracy. Read more
Second Circuit Deepens Red Flag Knowledge Circuit Split in Vimeo
The Second Circuit’s recent opinion in Capitol Records v. Vimeo is, to put it mildly, pretty bad. From its convoluted reasoning that copyrights under state law for pre-1972 sound recordings are limited by the DMCA safe harbors, despite the explicit statement in Section 301(c) that “rights or remedies” under state law “shall not be annulled or limited” by the Copyright Act, to its gutting of red flag knowledge by limiting it to the nearly-impossible situation where a service provider actually knows that a specific use of an entire copyrighted work is neither fair nor licensed yet somehow doesn’t also surmise that it’s infringing, it’s hard to see how either result is compelled by the statutes, much less how it was intended by Congress. Read more