February 2007

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Viacom v. GooTube – who’s evil?

7 February 2007 in Copyright | 2 comments

The battle for badness rages …

From Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing:

Viacom did a general search on YouTube for any term related to any of its shows [eg all those Jon Stewart clips] , and then spammed YouTube with 100,000 DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] take-down notices alleging that all of these clips infringed its copyright and demanding that they be censored off the Internet. YouTube made thousands of clips vanish, and sent warning notices to the people who’d posted them, warning them that they were now on a list of potential copyright infringers and telling them that repeat offenses could lead to having their accounts terminated.

This is shockingly bad behaviour on the part of both Viacom and Google, YouTube’s owner. Viacom’s indiscriminate spamigation is incredibly negligent and evil. … But Google’s lawyers should have known better, too … [Google should] sue the living shit out of Viacom. … They’d change the landscape so that DMCA notices were only used by people who were genuinely being ripped off, and not firehosed by idiots to every site that matches a search-term.

So, Viacom’s spamigation is bad and Google could do something about this. But is Google not evil too? Is it not bullying all copyright owners?

Gootube has taken the arrogant position with big media that “You can’t stop us. You can’t stop people from uploading your copyrighted materials and if you want us to, you have to do a deal with us”. With the little copyright owner who feels their work has been illegally hosted on Google Video they simply try to intimidate them.

Here is the ultimate challenge. Everyone should upload their personal porn collection to Youtube and see what happens. … What better way to call bullshit on Google.

Remember, its not about how they treat Viacom. VIacom is big enough to take care of itself. It is about hiding behind a law, the DMCA, at the expense of copyright owners, to dominate the online video space.

It’s all very well for Google to assert its right to copy what it believes it has a right to copy (eg fair use of in-copyright book content for Google Book Search), but to assert it has a right to publish anything – up to and including full-length feature films – because it can’t be bothered to check whether it infringes copyright is another matter altogether.

Will Google strike a fair deal?

2 February 2007 in Copyright, Law blogs

Welcome to the blawgosphere – and thanks – to Eoin O’Dell, a Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the School of Law, Trinity College Dublin, blogging at cearta.ie, mainly on contract, restitution, freedom of expression, media, IT and cyber law.

He refers to the excellent recent article in the New Yorker by Jeffrey Toobin on the Google Books project and the litigation it has spawned. Google’s Moon Shot – The quest for the universal library is a full and balanced account, concluding that a settlement between Google and the publishers is likely, but asking whether that will benefit the public.

In asserting its right to scan (ie copy) in-copyright works and make snippets of them available within its Book Search, Google relies on the US “fair use” exception. The publishers disagree. Google cannot wait around and is likely to settle. But, as Lawrence Lessig says:

if Google gives them anything at all, it creates a practical precedent, if not a legal precedent, that no one has the right to scan this material without their consent. That’s a win for them. The problem is that even though a settlement would be good for Google and good for the publishers, it would be bad for everyone else. … The publishers will get more than the law entitles them to, because Google needs to get this case behind it. And the settlement will create a huge barrier for any new entrants in this field.

Eoin adds the UK/Irish perspective, concluding that Google has an even greater incentive to come to an agreement with non-US (especially UK) publishers since our “fair dealing” exception is much narrower than the US “fair use”.

(Hat tip also to Slaw)

Tax law blogs

1 February 2007 in Law blogs

Robert Newey, English Solicitor and Chartered Tax Adviser is blogging on Law and Tax. Hearteningly, he writes:

inspired by your articles in Delia Venables’ newsletter [Ed: also published on this blog], I have set up a blog which I hope to update weekly. … At the moment I can’t find anyone else much writing on exactly this area.

Paul Solomons, solicitor and IHT specialist, has started his IHT-solutions blog on all inheritance tax matters.

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