Commentary

Liberation Pays Damages, Revises Takedown Approach, To Settle With Copyright Expert

Liberation Music has agreed to pay monetary damages to Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, who sued the companyfor demanding that YouTube remove one of his lectures.

The amount of the settlement isn't known. But whatever the amount, Lessig himself reportedly won't benefit financially, given that he intends to use the funds to support the Electronic Frontier Foundation's “open access” initiative -- which focuses on making scholarly work available for free. Liberation Music has also agreed to respect fair use in the future, according to the EFF, which helped represent Lessig in the lawsuit.

The settlement, finalized late last week, resolves a dispute that began last year, when Liberation Music complained to YouTube about Lessig's 49-minute clip titled “Open” -- a presentation about culture and the Web, which the copyright expert originally delivered at a 2010 Creative Commons conference in Seoul. Included in the presentation were five very brief clips -- all less than one minute -- of people around the world dancing to Phoenix's “Lisztomania.”

Lessig obviously thought the clips were a fair use. Someone at Liberation Music decided otherwise, and demanded that YouTube take down the entire presentation.

He sued Liberation for sending YouTube an improper takedown notice. While the Digital Millennium Copyright Act provides for lawsuits by subjects of unlawful takedown notices, such cases are extremely rare. One reason is that it's expensive to bring that kind of lawsuit; another is that it's hard to prove damages.

On top of that, it's not yet settled whether a content owner must consider fair use before sending a takedown notice. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is slated to decide that issue in one of the other rare lawsuits brought over questionable takedown notices -- the battle over a clip of a toddler dancing to Prince's “Let's Go Crazy.”

Unlike Liberation Music, which settled the case relatively quickly, Universal has been fighting the dancing baby case since 2007. The 9th Circuit could issue a ruling in that matter later this year.

1 comment about "Liberation Pays Damages, Revises Takedown Approach, To Settle With Copyright Expert".
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  1. Paul Robinson from Viridian Development Corporation, March 12, 2014 at 9:05 p.m.

    Content holders hate, I mean absolutely hate and despise "fair use" because it means that someone can use their works in a way they might not like it. But if there were no fair use provision the extra protections they got for copyrights would violate the 1st Amendment. Funny how they didn't mind having 20 years more time tacked onto their copyrights and in exchange gave nothing to the public. But when the public wants to have a little leeway, these copyright holders do what Henry Kravitz claims F. Ross Johnson did in the movie "Barbarians at the Gate": they send the public an "up yours" card.

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