A U.S. district judge got it right yesterday when he refused to dismiss a lawsuit against Universal, ruling that copyright holders should take into account fair use prior to issuing DMCA takedown notices. The dispute arose last year when a woman received a takedown notice over a YouTube video featuring a kid dancing to a Prince song owned by Universal.
Over at Ars, fellow TLFer Tim Lee has a good overview of the issue in which he explains how the various legal arguments played out. EFF, which represents the plaintiff in the case, offered several compelling reasons why ignoring fair use in a takedown notice might actually constitute “bad faith” under the DMCA.
As Cord discussed a few months ago, my employer, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, recently received a meritless takedown notice for a global warming ad we posted on YouTube which featured about seven seconds from a copyrighted video clip. Our use of a trivial portion of a copyrighted video was clearly both transformative and non-commercial, yet the content owner still deemed it worthwhile to try to get the video removed.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.