Universal claims fair use is fair game for DMCA takedown

Last week, a lawsuit against Universal Music Group (UMG) for allegedly abusing the DMCA takedown process has finally come before a judge. In that case Stephanie Lenz, with the backing of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), is claiming that the takedown request issued was made in bad faith and UMG should be penalized as a deterrent to future meritless claims.

In an interesting twist UMG’s lawyers seem to actually agree that the YouTube video in question is fair use rather than copyright infringement, but they’re arguing that they don’t have to take that into account before they issue a DMCA takedown request.

Read more at Afterdawn.com

MediaDefender’s illegal tactics take down legal video site

MediaDefender, a company best known for their work for the MPAA has apparently admitted to being responsible for a massive Denial of Service (DoS) attack that occured last weekend in which a server used to host BitTorrent trackers was effectively shut down. The server, which belongs to a company called Revision3, is used for legal distribution of video files.

According to Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback, the problem started when someone at the company noticed that their server was being used by an outside party to provide unauthorized BitTorrent trackers. He later found out that the outside party in question was, in fact, MediaDefender. Once they cut off access to these trackers, and also to the back door which allowed MediaDefender to illegally use their server they were hit with the DoS attack. This effectively shut them down for a good part of the weekend, and due to the Memorial Day holiday on Monday they weren’t able to recover until Tuesday.

Read more at Afterdawn.com

Judge tells YouTube to turn over viewing logs to Viacom

US District Court Judge Louis L. Stanton has ruled that Google must turn over to Viacom logs showing what videos have been watched on YouTube and when. The information will include login names and IP addresses for the viewers.

Viacom is suing the search giant for YouTube’s allegedl failure to live up to their legal responsibility for actively combating piracy on the service. Google has owned YouTube in 2006.

According to the ruling, “A markedly higher proportion of infringing-video watching may bear on plaintiffs’ vicarious liability claim, and defendants’ substantial non-infringing use defense.”

Viacom lawyers are claiming that YouTube intentionally turned a blind eye to copyright infringement because of the traffic it generated, and they’re hoping to show that YouTube officials knew, or should have known, the correllation between popularity and piracy.

Read more at Afterdawn.com

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