There's good news today for user generated video sites like YouTube, DailyMotion, and MetaCafe. A federal court in California has ruled that Veoh did not violate the copyright of a pornography company by automatically transcoding video uploaded by a user.

Let's back up a second here. If you upload copyrighted material to an online video site to share with others without the copyright holder's permission, you may be breaking the law. But the question of whether the video site itself is violating the law is a bit murkier. The IO Group, which owned the video in question filed a suit agains Veoh in 2006 claiming that the video service could not hide behind safe harbor laws by saying that the user, not the video site was responsible because Veoh took the action of transcoding the video into Flash for online viewing.

Of course, the process of transcoding a video is pretty much automatic, and the judge in this case seemed to understand that Veoh's action in transcoding the video were about as deliberate breathing. The ruling basically states that as long as a video site can demonstrate that it warns users that they should not upload copyrighted video without permission, removes copyrighted videos promptly when faced with a DMCA takedown notice, and at least makes some effort at sniffing out illegally uploaded videos, the company is lawsuit-proof. Or at least lawsuit-resistant up to a few meters.

[via TechCrunch]

When you buy a piece of software, you may or may not actually own it. In many instances, software makers insist that what you're actually paying for isn't ownership of the application, but a license to use the application. And if that's all you paid for, then you don't have the right to resell the software.

But what happens when you buy a software CD secondhand? Can you sell it then? That's what Tim Vernor, an eBay dealer did. He bought several copies of AutoCAD. But when he went to sell that software on eBay, Autodesk, the makers of the software contacted eBay and requested that the auctions be suspended. Vernor issued a response, and Autodesk never responded, so his sales were reinstated.

After doing this a few times, eBay apparently received one takedown notice too many, because the auction site canceled Vernor's account. So he took Autodesk to court, claiming that he has every right to sell the software. While formal arguments have yet to be presented, Vernor has already won the first round. A federal judge denied Autodesk's motion to dismiss the case, which means that it can go forward.

The ins and outs of the case are pretty complex, but the judge has ruled that Autodesk has not yet managed to show that Vernor was bound by the company's license and prohibited from reselling the software. If Vernor is successful, this case could pave the way for an increase in used software sales on sites like eBay, although it's likely that the case would only set a precedent in cases that are extraordinarily similar to Vernor's.

[via Techdirt]

Any time a copyright holder asks Google to remove a YouTube video, a funny thing happens: Google complies. But the company also adds a bit of metadata to let you know why the video has been pulled down. YouTomb is a site that scans YouTube for that metadata and shows you a list of recently removed videos.

You can't actually watch any videos on YouTomb. But you can find out who asked for them to be removed. You can also check out the site's stats page to see which copyright holders have requested the most takedowns. Currently TV Tokyo, Viacom, Warner Brothers, WWE, and NBC are near the top of the list. When we checked, YouTomb said it was monitoring 223280 videos, and had identified 4396 videos that had been removed for alleged copyright violations and 13363 videos that had been removed for other reasons.

YouTomb was put together by the folks at MIT Free Culture.

[via Google Operating System]

Finally someone, more specifically Ms. Del Cid has filed counterclaims against the RIAA under Florida, California, and Federal law. She's tired of the RIAA's nonsense and decided to uphold her right to defend herself and ultimately others, if this case turns out right.

The claims Ms. Cid is bringing against the RIAA are of Trespass, Computer Fraud and Abuse, Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices, Civil Extortion, and Civil conspiracy. Now we're talking. The RIAA has been terrorizing many people who they knew didn't have anything to do with alleged copyright violations, including dead people, young children, and the elderly. Ms Cid's counterclaim aims to prove exactly that the RIAA used questionable means to obtain what they refer to as evidence.

Who knows if it will slow down or bring any real resolution to the tyranny of the ridiculous, but here's crossing our fingers that it moves things in the right direction.

As it currently stands, copying your HD-DVDs to make backups is a grey legal area. It's legal for you to make the backup, but the HD-DVD disc you're copying is encrypted as a 'security' measure and, thanks to the DMCA it's illegal for you to unencrypt it in anything but an "approved device" and -- surprise of surprises -- no "approved devices" have the ability to write out that backup copy.

That could change. According to Macworld the content companies may be ready to bend just a little, adding a "managed copy" provision to the licensing of AACS -- the HD DVD content protection system -- which would allow for homemade copies, albeit at a higher cost.

"The idea is that the content companies could charge a premium according to how many copies are allowed, Ayers said. It remains a possibility that consumers, if given the chance to make three copies of "Spider-man 2" could give those copies to their neighbors, which technically would qualify as low-volume piracy."

Given the fragility of DRM in general, and growing consumer awareness and dissatisfaction with the limits DRM attempts to impose, this move could be seen in one of two ways. Either the content producers are starting to realize that home consumers are not the source of piracy problems, and probably shouldn't be alienated given that they are the source of revenue driving the industry -- or -- This is simply a stop-gap measure being implemented by an industry who sees the walls are crumbling, but is powerless to truly understand why. Our cynicism tends to push us towards the latter answer but, maybe that's just our skeptical nature?

The next time one of your fair-use zealot friends starts in on a tirade over dinner, you may want to pay closer attention. Shelly Batts, a Phd candidate at the University of Michigan, recently received a nasty-gram from Wiley, publishers of the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, ordering her -- in some fairly stern language -- to remove a diagram she'd used in a post on her site.

"In short, I was threatened with legal action if I didn't take it down immediately. I used a panel a figure, and a chart, from over 10+ figures in the paper. I cited and reported everything straight forwardly. I would think they'd be happy to get the press" wrote Batts. You'd think Wiley's legal team would recognize one of the most clear cut cases of fair use possible; that of excerpting for scientific discussion. Then again, you'd think a host of other mega-corporations would be familiar with existing fair-use statutes and recognize when their intellectual property is being used in a responsible, legal manner. Not so.

When will we see legislation to protect bloggers, writers and video editors from these intellectual property bullies?

[via Boing Boing]

Pandora is a music discovery service we've covered before. It goes beyond "regular" internet radios, who largely base their taxonomy and discovery services on rather flat databases and sterile genre/artist/album nomenclature. At best, you might get web-based social suggestions, like what built MySpace and makes Virb sing. Pandora utilizes the research and ongoing classifications of the Music Genome Project to suggest songs similar to the ones you already enjoy.

The Music Genome project is a story in itself, but Pandora uses real, live musicians to dissect songs and analyze their pieces and parts, organizing that data in such a way that, frankly, makes it a little scary to use Pandora regularly. Once you "seed" a radio station with an artist (something you can try on their homepage for free without even registering), subsequent songs are based on the style of that original artist (and the random song chosen by Pandora from said artist). You can give a simple thumbs up or down to indicate your song preferences as each new song plays.

A provision in the DMCA allows Pandora to play these songs, almost every released song out there. They really make an effort to grab the long tail and most of their songs, once you start just listening, are not well-known. You can't rewind or even go back, due to the restrictions of the DMCA, but you can order the songs from Amazon or iTunes as you listen. All together, Pandora is a remarkable service for a "simple" internet radio service.

But a ruling from an obscure, 3-person panel from the Library of Congress threatens the existence of Pandora, and every other internet radio service out there. The plan from the Copyright Royalty Board is to increase the fees to internet radio operators so high that they will effectively be out of business. Paying $.0008 a song might not sound much, but if you consider the millions of songs per day served up by Pandora alone, it becomes a very large bill indeed.

There is an appeals process, and those threatened are taking action. However, it might require legislative action. Ultimately it is puzzling why the RIAA (proponents of the onerous charges) would threaten a nascent industry in such a way. What's to gain? Web radio has no doubt spurred online music purchases, much as the radio generated (and continues to generate) wads of dough for the music biz.

We sat down with Tim Westergren, the man behind the Genome Project, and the founder of Pandora. In our interview, Tim explains the basic situation, and where some logic might prevail (we hope).

In yet another example of pushing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to the limits and then pushing it just a little bit more, the NFL has chosen to selectively obey some DMCA clauses while disobeying others. No bonus points for guessing that this saga involves YouTube, which has recently become the expanding mass at center of the DMCA dispute universe.

Wendy Seltzer, a former EFF lawyer who founded the Chilling Effects project, posted a clip of the NFL's over-zealous copyright warning from the Super Bowl (an educational use of material that is clearly covered under existing Fair Use statues) upon which the NFL brought down the wrath of Zeus issued a DMCA takedown notice. Seltzer, knowing her rights, replied to YouTube with her fair use claims, and YouTube responded by allowing the video to return. The DMCA prohibits the NFL from filing another notice in that case, but that's exactly what they did. YouTube, possibly not knowing what they'd done given the volume of DMCA issues they're processing, obeyed the now fraudulent takedown notice and Seltzer's video is once again off-line.

Remember what we said the other day about how the copyright claims of individuals were just as important as those of the big corporations? This is a perfect example of the disparity that exists under current law. Just because the NFL would rather not have a former EFF lawyer using them as an example of copyright lunacy gone berzerk, doesn't give them the rights to not play by the rules.

[via Boing Boing]

Pandora is living on borrowed time, and they'd like you to sign this petition. A recent change to the structure of royalty payments for streaming audio broadcasts will surely kill online streaming as we know it, unless something changes, and soon.

Pandora founder Tim Westergren writes, "Internet radio is hostage to a blatantly discriminatory double standard that was written into the federal statute governing webcasting several years ago, following an intensive lobbying effort by the RIAA. We need to redress this, and create a more level playing field - one that of course rewards musicians for their work, and one that also understands the business realities, and benefits of online radio."

As one witty Digg comment put so elegantly, "The best Pandora can come up with is an online petition? Oh s**t we're screwed."

Take a minute to sign the petition at Save The Streams, and let's all cross our fingers in hopes that someone listens and this mess goes away.

Great day in the morning; Content owners who were knocked off-line by Viacom's indiscriminate shotgun approach to using the DMCA have taken a strike in return. When you fire off a DMCA "takedown" notice -- as you might remember from the Michael Crook incident -- you're making a claim that the content you want removed actually belongs to you. The content owners affected by Viacom's less than precision attack on YouTube are suing Viacom for claiming rights to content it doesn't own.

This is a pretty clear cut battle of corporate rights versus citizen rights. Viacom is playing the gotta break eggs to make an omlet defense, downplaying the chilling effect its indiscriminate use of the DMCA had on other legitimate copyright holders. What's flawed about that logic is this; If Viacom's copyrights are important, so are yours. We must seek to defend independent producers just as vigilantly as we aim to protect the Viacoms of the world.

[via Techdirt]

See Also:
Viacom files copyright suit against Google for $1 billion
EFF looking for victims of Viacom
Viacom becomes DMCA bully

We've been bemoaning the DMCA a lot around Download Squad lately, but here's a tale with a happy -- if schadenfreude -- ending. Michael Crook has become famous around the blog-o-sphere; As a thorn in the side of some high profile blogs.

It all started when Crook landed in the hotseat on the popular Fox News Channel's Hannity and Colmes for his hoax web campaign to reduce the pay of US Troops. Later, when Crook pulled another Internet hoax, scamming personals browsers on Craigslist, screen captures of his earlier appearance made the rounds on a slew of blogs. Crook sent DMCA takedown notices to ISPs hosting blogs which posted screen captures of his appearance; Pictures Crook didn't own the rights to. Nevertheless, he succeeded in using the DMCA to bully and harass bloggers, establishing himself a third time as a first rate Internet griefer. The Troll who would be King.

Sweet justice to see him apologize live before a camera as part of the court settlement. Now, if only we could get a few Viacom executives to do the same. Here's a deal; You bring the execs, I'll bring the camera, capiche?

Well, who would have seen that coming? Apparently the Motion Picture Association isn't particularly happy about BackupHDDVD, a tool developed by the hackers over at the doom9 forum that decrypts AACS encryption on HD DVDs.

The MPAA sent a notice to SourceForge, asking them to take down all the files related to the program, and SourceForge complied. That's not to say that you can't find the files if you know how to look for them. But as the folks at doom9 point out, Antigua-based SlySoft has also released software that allows users to decrypt HD-DVD discs without any repercussions, so perhaps BackupHDDVD will eventually wind up with an off-shore home.

While there's some question about whether BackupHDDVD actually infringes on any copyrights or simply utilizes AACS, the truth of the matters is it's unlikely the developers have the resources to fight a legal battle.

[via Slashdot]

We recently told you how network giant Viacom sent a flood of DMCA notices demanding thousands of video clips be removed from YouTube. They even went so far as to demand the removal of videos containing no Viacom content at all, and still countless other clips which clearly fall under fair use. Viacom's shotgun approach to removing potentially infringing video from YouTube has not only angered fair use advocates and a few innocent bystanders but, peeked piqued the interest of the Electronic Frontier Foundation as well.


The EFF is asking those caught in the mess created by Viacom's spamigation to step forward and let them know. The 1 minute video clip shown above does an excellent job of explaining this whole mess in a witty and irreverent tone. It's going to take sharp action from a body such as the EFF to make corporate giants think twice about indiscriminately sending DMCA notices before they're sure they've identified actual infringement.

Don't you dare dance the Electric Slide in Second Life or upload those videos of you breaking out a mean 'Lectric Slide in front of your webcam. Aside from making yourself look rather silly (or, in rare cases, highly co-ordinated) you'll be running afoul of copyright law and opening yourself up to some hot Digital Millenium Copyright Act action.

Richard Silver, who copyrighted the dance in 2004 (he claims to have created the dance in 1976) has had enough of lame imitations of his original dance. Wikipedia reports a completely different origin for the Electric Slide but that hasn't stopped a possibly delusional Silver. He's enlisted the help of the DMCA to force Electric Slide animations to be removed from Second Life and videos of people performing the dance deleted from YouTube. CNet quotes EFF lawyer Jason Schultz, attempting to make some sense of all this, "Someone who performs [The Electric Slide] non-commercially or adds their own artistic flair to the dance has a pretty good fair-use argument that their performance is non-infringing."

I'd caution Mr. Schultz on his analysis, we once thought video and audio sampling was fair use too, but look what happened to that.

Viacom's massive YouTube takedown notice last week sent chills through the spine of the online video world. It also caught hundreds, if not thousands of non-infringing videos in its wake. ZDNet's Steve O'Hear writes, "[Viacom] simply ran a crude keyword search against any Viacom trademarks or brands - which has resulted in, potentially, thousands of User-Generated videos being caught in the crossfire."

Cory Doctorow takes Viacom's legal team to task, "The idea that they have members of the bar -- officers of the court! -- signing affidavits swearing that they have a good-faith belief that these clips infringe their copyrights is disgraceful. Practicing law is a privilege, not a right. The law societies should be holding these attorneys to account for this kind of behaviour."

He's right, law societies should be holding attorneys to a higher standard than this example demonstrates but, what about us, the Viacom consuming public? We should be outraged and vocal about the fact that takedown notices such as this go too far, and even more vocal about our displeasure with the law which makes fiascoes like this possible, The Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That one piece of legislation puts YouTube in jeporady if it fails to comply immediately. It's a standard which allows Viacom to indiscriminately terrorize the YouTube community, while forcing the users of YouTube to deal with the aftermath. Where the DMCA is concerned, you the user are guilty until proven innocent.