Copyright claim / fair usage We are a sports website covering news and have found a user on YouTube copying our written content and images and pasting it in whole in their videos. We have put in a copyright claim and got some videos taken down but they have put in a counter claim saying it is fair use and they will sue is if we don’t remove the initial claim. Where do we stand on this? They are using 100% of our article content including images, and not even putting in any original content of their own.
First, I don't know what "Sir is" means - I assume it is a typo of "sue us" and answer on that basis. Also, you don't tell us where you are and local law differs - I will assume US law. They can't sue you successfully - that's not how the "Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act" works. The way it works is: You give the "online service provider" (YouTube) a notice of the claimed infringement that complies with section 512. YouTube must expeditiously remove or disable access to the allegedly infringing material and take reasonable steps to promptly notify the alleged infringer of the action. The alleged infringer then has the right to object to the takedown. If they do, you have 14 days to bring a lawsuit in the district court alleging breach of copyright: If you don't then YouTube will restore the material - essentially you have given up your claim that the material infringes your copyright, If you do then the court will decide if the material does or does not breach copyright. The alleged infringer can raise a fair use defense if they like and they may or may not be right. If you win, you get damages, if you lose, you pay damages. In practice, you and the alleged infringer may opt for an out of court settlement instead.
Online file converters are legal: there is no law that prohibits a person from making a program available and executing online, including creating output in the form of a file. It is possible that some person may illegally copy copyright-protected material then use a website to modify that material, in which case the question of vicarious liability for copyright infringement could arise, so we appeal to the DMCA safe harbor provisions to see what the website must do. First, the owner of copyright must submit a properly constructed takedown notice to the website. Crucially, the notice must contain sufficient information that the website operator can find and take down the item(s) in question. Assuming that the complainant can supply the &quot;where is it&quot; information, then there is a notice and counter-notice routine where the uploader is informed and can deny the accusation – the website operator doesn't evaluate the merits of the claim, he only sees that the formalities were observed. If the operator follows the rules, he cannot be held vicariously liable. If the link does not expire and if it is somehow promulgated, the technical potential for being a contributor to copyright infringement becomes very real, but it puts the operator in no worse a legal position than Youtube. So the question is not just related to OCILLA, it is entirely covered by that law. Questions of how users or website owners are &quot;supposed to&quot; act don't figure into this. If the website owner does not comply with those provisions, they have no access to the safe harbor provisions, and they can be sued. However, the website itself remains legally &quot;permitted&quot; (there never was a prohibition of such a website).
It depends where you and your friend are and where the copyright was created. Ripping music for personal use is considered fair use/fair dealing in most jurisdictions. Having multiple copies/devices for personal use is OK too - practically, you can't watch more than one at a time unless you have a very unusual brain. If the intention is that both you and he would have and use copies then that is a violation.
The images and text are copyright (if they are). What Google does with them is fair use/dealing. It works like this: if Google's bot can find them then you (the owner) have put them on the World Wide Web presumably because you want people to see them, effectively you have put them on public display. Google is assisting you in that endeavour by enabling people who are looking for what you are displaying to find it. Their use of your material enhances its value to you which is a rock solid defence. If you don't want your stuff on public display then a) don't put it on a public part of the web - there are plenty of private cloud storage facilities or B) stick a file in your website that tells bots not to index it.
You can do whatever you like with posts made after you change the rules - you have to leave the previous stuff alone. The contributors' have accepted the terms of the licence: They own the copyright or have permission from the copyright holder to post it (the promise) They agree that it can be edited altered or removed CC-BY-SA allows people to copy the stuff off the website and republish it - this is way outside what the contributors agreed to. These people have given permission for their work to be altered but not copied.
The notification that you saw is not useful legal information for you: stuff always belongs to whoever owns the stuff. It might be interpreted as saying "it doesn't belong to us", but you can't count on that (it's virtually guaranteed that at least some of the content there is owned by the website owner). A more informative statement would be "You will have to get permission from the content owner to copy their stuff", and "We're not going to spend time figuring out who owns what". You could read the terms of service (try this with Stack Exchange) to see what the site tells people. The TOS here says that if you contribute anything, it "is perpetually and irrevocably licensed to Stack Exchange under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license". You can then look up what that license says and learn what that allows. Websites are kind of tricky, though, because it's not hard to change the wording of a TOS, and you need to know what specific TOS was promulgated at the time a particular contribution was unleashed. Usual practice is to think it through carefully and not frequently tweak the TOS, but it's not illegal to change the TOS. Note that copyright law does not prohibit you from using other people's stuff, it prohibits you from copying. The distinction is clearer when you see a post that explains an algorithm with actual code, you read and learn and make use of that, but write your own code. As a user out there, if there isn't a clear indication that stuff posted is there for the taking, under some public license (as is the case with SE), then getting specific permission to copy, from the owner of the content (possibly untraceable), would be necessary. Now assume that you're a moderator or site-owner of some forum: presumably (hopefully) you have a TOS that addresses that situation, which says that moderators have the right to edit or delete content at their sole discretion, and also you say what kinds of posts are prohibited. Such an statement is not absolutely mandatory for all things, but it may be necessary to avoid litigation over some acts. One one end of the spectrum, it would be illegal for a forum to host child porn, stolen credit card numbers, or protected digital content. If a user were to post such stuff, the site would need to eliminate that stuff, and the poster could not legally rely on an argument of the type "That's my stuff, you have no right to mess with it". On the other hand, if a forum actually requires paid membership, then there may be a strong contractual expectation that the user is getting something of value, so you would have to watch for statements that could be interpreted as broad permission to put stuff out there without any interference. (For instance, a file-hosting service would have only minimal restrictions on content, aimed at protecting their own legal interests; whereas a political-advocacy site would have maximal interest in prohibiting the expression of views counter to the cause). Thus the SE TOS has you "grant Stack Exchange the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to use, copy, cache, publish, display, distribute, modify, create derivative works", which allows moderators to correct typos, delete offensive wording, and obliterate entire posts. If a site fails to have any such clauses in their TOS, then it might be a matter that has to be settled in court, whether they have the right to eliminate "spam" (i.e. advertising for a service, especially if the reason for getting an account was to provide an advertising platform). In light of the limited use sanctioned by the TOS, per the below comment, legal copying will be quite limited. However, "fair use" a situation where copying is allowed, regardless of what the TOS may say. (You could be banned from the site, but you could not be sued for infringement). Fair use was invented precisely so that people could make comments like "Jones advocates an absurd law, saying '...[quote from Jones]...'". Thus you can comment on a post and quote the relevant part ("The lines '[... quoting the code ...]' results in an infinite loop"). See the Fair Use FAQ for more details.
Stack Exchange have already covered this in a couple of places, from MSE's A site (or scraper) is copying content from Stack Exchange. What should I do?: When should I not report these sites? They follow all the attribution requirements. As mentioned before, there is nothing wrong with copying our content elsewhere on the web, so long as they are following all the attribution requirements given. There is no action we can take against a scraper who follows all the rules. And the old Attribution Required blog post mentions that the actual requirements are: Visually indicate that the content is from Stack Overflow or the Stack Exchange network in some way. It doesn’t have to be obnoxious; a discreet text blurb is fine. Hyperlink directly to the original question on the source site (e.g., http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12345) Show the author names for every question and answer Hyperlink each author name directly back to their user profile page on the source site (e.g., http://stackoverflow.com/users/1234567890/username) By “directly”, I mean each hyperlink must point directly to our domain in standard HTML visible even with JavaScript disabled, and not use a tinyurl or any other form of obfuscation or redirection. Furthermore, the links must not be nofollowed
There doesn't need to be any copyright claim for there to be copyright protection. The protection is given automatically whenever someone authors a work. If you make money off of your improved version, the owner of the page may sue you for royalties. The only way to avoid this is to ask him for permission, or to create your page without using any of the source code of the original page.