Copyrights and F-Chat

We HAVE lawyers..........

Frank Foster
Future328driver.
John Houghtaling




"Let 'em eat cake!!!!!"

 

.....or 'fur pie' as it were.............................

 

"Possession of an attorney is nine tenths of the law"

 

And you are a professional in that

Take a few chugs for me today, Bubba!

 

Who is BigTex? Did I miss a name change?

 

iceburns's dad too

 

Good question.

In the past month, the two top websites showing footage from Formula 1 received Emails from "Netresult" acting on behalf of FOM (Formula One Management), telling them to remove all copyrighted F1 content from their websites. They complied, and would probably have been sued if they didn't.

It's sad, because the sites were entirely not for profit, and did nothing other than promote Formula 1; but the bureaucrats at FOM are too thick to comprehend something like that.

The wesbites were www.f1onboard.com and www.ukf1.net

 

Because this site is has it's own hosting of pictures and requires a sign in to view threads I'd assume it's largely safe.

 

I think Rob's protected himself relatively well... just look at the terms of use you all agreed to when you signed up.

http://www.ferrarichat.com/termsofuse.htm

My interpretation of this (and I'm no lawyer) is that if you illegally post copyrighted material here, the responsibility for any copyright violations falls squarely on your shoulders.

 

I wonder if I start hosting a free-for-all for MP3 downloads where the members upload MP3s to my server. Will I get sued? I will put a really good disclaimer I won't just get sued, I will probably find myself in a Federal Pen. Think of Napster that hosted lists of files and where to get them from and look how they fell. I don't think they even had any MP3s on their server, just supernode lists and file lists.

Disclaimer: I am not an attorney. Please feel free to correct me if I am wrong

 

2-shay.

Yeah, anyone can sue anyone at any time for any reason. I just meant that the terms of use were such that ferrarichat's operator has openly stated their stance on copyrighted material, and thats about all that can be expected. But unlike napster, ferrarichat isnt set up with the sole purpose of transmitting copyrighted material.

Sux that we live in such a litigious world, but it's the way things are for now... I guess its a price we pay for living in a civilized society.

 

One thing to make the Copyright hold up in court is the image has to be registered with the copyright office, before it can be taken to court. I have images that have been submitted to the copyright office and from what i understand is they are backed up for well over a year now.

The Advent of digital photography has created a nightmare when it comes to copy rights as it is easy to transfer and copy the image and move it around. In the past month alone i have sent in 10,000 images for registration with the copyright office. So lets see 100,000+ photographers submitting 10,000 images a month............

In reality if i find an image of mine on a site that does not have my permission, Etc. I will contact the webmaster with a statement that they are in copyright violation.. Most of the time the images are removed in short order. One thing i also remind them of is that the image must be removed form any archived copies of there site also.

Just my take on the entire subject.

Rob

 

While we're on the subject, what difference does it make if a pic is posted? I mean, it's not like it was used for commercial purpose ... the posting or not does not bring any revenue to anyone, does it?

 

This is my field. As a result of the Netcom case (which i was involved in, for the Church of Scientology), the essential holding of which was codified in §512 of the U.S. Copyright Act, an ISP which has no actual knowledge or participation in infringing postings is ordinarily not liable for the activities of its posters unless it receives a statutorily compliant notice and then fails to take action to remove the offending posting. Such notices from copyright owners do not require copyright registration of the work as a condition to the effectiveness of the 512 notice. As Beast mentions, though, ordinarily the copyrighted work must be registered in the US Copyright Office to commence suit in a US Federal Court for copyright infringement. (The registration requirement is inapplicable to authors who qualify as non-US authors within a highly technical definition in the statute).
Sportveloce, unless you really prefer prison food, i would suggest you forget the idea of an MP3 free-for-all. The industry is not very happy these days, the court ruling in Grokster was viewed as a major set-back and if you do something that can be held up to scrutiny, trust me, very few will hestitate to take your head off.
Zorro- the answer to your question rests in the destruction of the market for the authorized versions. Think of file-sharing. Free-trading in files, for no "profit," still has a major impact on the regular sales by the copyright owner. The US Copyright Act was amended a few years ago, on the criminal side, to make it clear that criminality could be established for "free" posting of copyrighted content, based on the value of the copyrighted work.

 

Great post, thanks for all the factual info. I thought I remembered your specialty being intellectual property.

 

i have posted many such pictures. they are free to the public and i am a paying member to both the sites i post from.( the pay pics are NOT safe under the Fchat rules to post) if i were to remove the copyright, that would be Illegal. sharing the free pictures and leaving the origin / photographers credit is not illegal, its like listing a source in a bibliography, as in "I" did not take this pic, but i sure like it!
rob can delete anything he wishes or change the rules / or close the Bikini thread, if it becomes a problem for the whole of the community. i do think you have a great question, be interesting to see the answer. ( yea i probably am wrong, but i have not gotten any nasty notes!)

 

Carreaper speaks to a practice common on the Internet which has never really been addressed by any court i am aware of; that is, if someone willingly posts copyrighted material on the Internet, there is at least an argument that they are making it available for others to download. Reposting is not necessarily the same as downloading, however, and one cannot assume that simply because something is on the Internet, its copyright owner meant for copies to be proliferated without authorization. (For example, there are any number of instances where material is posted to the Internet without the copyright owner's permission or awareness, so the argument that the rights owner intended for you to download and/or re-post is not going to be supportable). Carreaper is also correct that its bad news to remove the copyright notice and other credit information, but you should be aware that giving credit, and/or retaining the copyright notice is not a defense to infringement. Regards.

 

Bill, I appreciate you helping us, the great unwashed, out. May I please ask one followup question?

What is the current status, in 30 words or less, of the Fair Use theory? For example, let's assume, hypothecially, that I subscribe to an online version of a national news publication. Let's also say that I read an article on this site that just blows the political views of a certain attorney out on the left coast into the weeds. Am I okay reposting a portion of this article, with full attribution, on F-Chat? Note that I'm not posting the full article, I'm just posting a portion.

Or is this an area that is so murky and full of minefields that not even angels such as yourself dare thread?

Dale

 

"Fair Use" was traditionally an equitable exception to the exclusive rights of the copyright owner, and permitted selected quotation or "appropriation" of something less than the entirety of a copyrighted work, for comment, criticism, scholarship and the like, without permission, and often over the objection, of the copyright owner. Over the years, the doctrine has been
expanded to cover copying of the entirety of a work (Betamax case- home videotaping of broadcast TV for time-shifting purposes), and is now used as justification for such things as "platform shifting" (ie, i already bought one copy, i should be able to make a copy for my car, which uses a different format); "space-shifting" (ie, i have multiple playback machines in different homes; i bought one copy and should be able to make additional copies to use in my other machines, located elsewhere), though the latter two have not really gotten a judicial imprimatur.

Theoretically, your use falls within classic fair use notions, with one problem: that is, the material which you would like to "appropriate" is contained in a subscription-based publication which may have additional, non-copyright type restrictions on copying and redistribution that may be enforceable purely as a matter of contract, possibly based on trade secret/confidentiality and unfair competition grounds. In other words, the copyright law may permit what you contemplate, but since your access to the work could be conditioned on compliance with a contract that prohibits such activity, you could get into trouble for reasons other than copyright. So, check the boilerplate in your subscription agreement. Also, there is some law, not broadly accepted, that says if you had unlawful access to the work (ie you misused your subscription in a way which is prohibited, therefore, your access was improper), the fair use doctrine shouldn't apply.

Even if you can overcome these hurdles, the application of the doctrine is fact intensive, and depends on the amount taken, relative to the original work as a whole, whether the original work is thick or "thin" with copyright protection, was published widely, or is of limited circulation or unpublished, and the potential market impact on the original work. The courts now pay heed to so-called transformative uses, ie those that change the use of the appropriated material to build on it, and not simply use it for its intrinsic purpose. But, that's just another label, since the case articulating that was the 2 Live Crew case, which, to me, condoned a use of roy orbison's "Pretty Woman" as transformative when it was essentially the same song, sung rap style, with misogynist lyrics.
So, there you have it, in three hundred, not thirty, words....(or so).

 

Sh!TTTTT

What's you say! Read the manual. Hell, man, I ain't gonna read no stinkin manual. Like the man sez, "Whatsa in the rear view mirror, no a counta!"

Actually, thanks. Although, in this case, I suspect that you might have had a hand in writing the subscription agreement in this purely hypothetical case.

But I guess I could always pled that in was in the nation's best interests because that wacko lawyer out there in the law of fruits and nuts really needed to have his ears pinned back. But, once again, I'm talking purely in a hypothetical sense.

Dale

 

Speedy308

 

Thanks