Ars Technica: The US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit today issued a ruling that could change the contours of fair use and copyright takedown notices.
In an opinion (PDF) published this morning, the three-judge panel found that Universal Music Group's view of fair use is flawed. The record label must face a trial over whether it wrongfully sent a copyright takedown notice over a 2007 YouTube video of a toddler dancing to a Prince song.
1 comment:
This article confused me, probably because I don't know a whole lot about copyright law in the first place. From what I understand, companies now have to demonstrate that they consider fair use before they send a take-down notice...weren't they already doing that?? I guess the view of companies like Universal is that they look for users that use their content at all rather than specifically for people that violate copyright law, as suggested by the case of the mom's home video.
The idea that a computer program will do a better job in determining fair use is also a confusing one. Is it because since the program is created to analyze whether something is fair use or not, there's automatically proof that the copyright-holder considered fair use before the take-down notice went out. As the end of the article pointed out, though, there are other parameters of fair use than length of segment, and it's unclear how the web-crawler programs are able to identify those other factors.
Post a Comment