Fox News DMCA-Bombs News1News on YouTube - The Possible Legal Ramifications

[Turborama]

Fox News DMCA-Bombs News1News on YouTube

Posted November 13th, 2009 by Arthur Bright
in Copyright DMCA Fair Use Video

=snip=

According to Gawker, Fox issued some 150 DMCA takedowns to the News1News channel, which high-profile lefty blogs — such as the Huffington Post, Mediaite, Truthdig, and indeed Gawker itself — use as a source for the Beck/O'Reilly snippets that they want to ridicule. As a result, YouTube, which has a three-strikes DMCA policy, shut down the News1News channel completely, leaving pinko blogs everywhere at a loss. Although not for long, Gawker notes. News1News relaunched under a new name, but apparently has already received a new round of takedowns from Fox. Fox miraculously spared various conservative YouTube channels from its DMCA assault, despite their posting of the same or similar content.

What I find most interesting in this case is not Fox's barefaced attempt to shut up its critics. Who didn't expect that? And Fox is arguably within its rights to assert copyright infringement against News1News. But what I find interesting is how News1News' video-clipping "service" squares with fair use.

Generally speaking, many cases of fair use involve a single entity publishing both an excerpt of someone else's work and some sort of criticism or commentary on that work. Certainly, this is how it tends to happen in print or traditional audiovisual media. Take, for example, Time Inc. v. Bernard Geis Associates, 293 F.Supp. 130 (D.C.N.Y. 1968), in which fair use protected the publisher of a book containing stills from the Zapruder film of President Kennedy's assassination from a copyright infringement suit brought by Time Inc., which owned the rights in the film. As is inherent for printed material, the book contained both the copyrighted content and the commentary upon that content. The publisher was the single source of the publication, if you will.

Fair use publication on the Internet can also follow such a single-source model. It happened a few weeks ago when Boing Boing reposted a photo of a freakishly photoshopped Ralph Lauren model and noted just how freakishly photoshopped she was. Both the photo and the webpage containing the commentary upon the photo are hosted by the Boing Boing server: thus, they were published from a single source.

Full article with embedded links: http://www.citmedialaw.org/blog/2009/fox-news-dmca-bombs-news1news-youtube

[msongs]

1. youtube could comply with fokkks - delete ALL bill o'reilly etc :-) nt

[Warpy]

2. This isn't solely an attack against pinko blogs

This is all part and parcel of Murdoch deciding that all his content is so important that he can charge for it and people will pay for it.

Without wider access by the web, I'm afraid Rupert is going to find his stuff ghettoized and relegated to the lunatic fringes faster than a million leftist blogs could possibly accomplish it.

I don't think his "stars" are going to be happy with it, either.

[DumpDavisHogg]

3. Fuxx News committed perjury

For any person or organization to abuse the DMCA, when they know the "infringing" material is protected under fair use, is perjury. Didn't Kent Hovind get busted on this?

[jberryhill]

5. Yes

They can be penalized if there is a valid fair use argument here, since the DMCA certification's requires the copying not be a fair use.

[Maraya1969]

4. Can't people immediately download a video once it is put on on Youtube

before it is taken down? That way thousands of people will have the videos and they can put them up themselves. How can Fixed noise stop that?

I don't know how to capture a video from my TV but I would like to because sometimes I see so many distortions I believe that the rest of the world should see them too.