Thursday, August 21, 2008

Motion to dismiss complaint denied in case against Universal Music over misrepresentation in DMCA notice

David Kravets of Wired.com reports that, in Lenz v. Universal, the case against Universal Music based upon its issuance of a false DMCA notice, the defendant's motion to dismiss the complaint has been denied.

The court held that in issuing a DMCA notice, one must take into account whether the use is a "fair use" under the Copyright Act.

We first learned of the Wired.com report through Slashdot.


Commentary & discussion:

Switched



Keywords: digital copyright law online internet law legal download upload peer to peer p2p file sharing filesharing music movies indie independent label freeculture creative commons pop/rock artists riaa independent mp3 cd favorite songs intellectual property portable music player

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Considering that Universal filed a take-down that complied with the DMCA requirements in all respects and sent it to the YouTube e-mail address for DMCA take-down notices...

...AND THEN claimed that a disclaimer included with the notice meant it wasn't really a DMCA take-down notice or subject to the rest of the provisions of the DMCA is simply astonishing in its audacity.

While to this man's feelings the judge should have ruled for the plaintiff and sanctioned Universal in a New York Minute after he heard/read that argument, he does get kudos for apparently not buying that, or a whole lot of other Universal lawyer crap, that they threw up hoping something would stick.

Would that the judges in the RIAA v Filesharer cases were seeing through the Plaintiffs obfuscations so easily.

{The Common Man Speaking}

Stephanie said...

Since there aren't any comments here (yet), I wanted to grab the opportunity to thank you for this blog and for following my case, even though it's not technically RIAA vs The People but the reverse ;). I've been reading here for quite some time, I think since early- to maybe mid-2006, constantly barraging friends with links to your entries (esp the Andersen case).

Cheers,

Stephanie

Lior said...

Not being a lawyer, I've always been curious about the "declare under penalty of perjury" boilerplate included in every DMCA takedown notice. Despite many cases coming up where the declarations turned out to be false, I have no heard of any instance where the attorney making the declaration was in fact prosecuted (or just sanctioned) for committing perjury.

Does this wording actually have any legal force?

Matt Fitzpatrick said...

Ah, some good news at last! This week's been hurting for it.

DMCA notice mills -- which, just like commercial spam operations, spider for targets, send partially or fully automated notices, and repeatedly target the same content months after counter-notices are given -- have been eroding fair use on the Internet for too long. It's just too easy to automate extrajudicial IP enforcement as a shotgun approach against an international public not nearly familiar enough with U.S. copyright law to set things straight.

Well, now things are getting set straight. No more flouting 512(f). This goes for not just UMG, but also Viacom (who's milled 350,000 DMCA notices), 15-year-old cyberhooligans -- even the U.S. government, most of whose works are, by law, not copyrighted. If you send DMCA takedown notices, you better be prepared to justify each and every one of them in a court of law, and fair use will be a factor.