How does the Supreme Court ruling in *Fourth Estate* not undermine the DMCA&#39;s notice-and-takedown process? The Supreme Court recently ruled in Fourth Estate v. Wall-Street.com that copyright registration occurs (and thus an infringement action can be brought) only after the Copyright Office takes action and registers, or declines to register, the copyright at issue. How does this not undermine the DMCA's notice-and-takedown process? For example, if a web news media outlet were to upload a copyright-eligible breaking news video to YouTube and the next day discover that their video had been re-uploaded on another platform, the usual go-to option for recourse is to file a DMCA notification of claimed infringement. The alleged infringer may in turn respond by filing a counter-notification, to which the claimant must then respond by either (a) doing nothing, or (b) filing suit within fourteen days. How is that latter option still available in light of the court’s ruling in Fourth Estate? I know that preregistration is one option. It's not a financially viable solution, though, and almost no one uses it.
This will indeed mean that when a person claiming copyright ownership has filed a DMCA takedown notice, and the alleged infringer has filed a counter-notice, the claimed copyright owner will be unable to file a suit within 14 days unless the copyright was already registered, except in those cases where the author is not a US national, in which case the requirement for registration does not apply. Of course, the US Congress could amend DMCA to change the takedown procedure after a counter-notice. However, it should be noted that counter-notices are much less frequent than are take-down notices, and that suits are filed within 14 days in only a small fraction of counter-notice cases. It should also be noted that an ISP or other hosting provider is not required to restore the content after a counter-notice if suit is not filed within 14 days. The only consequence for not restoring the content in such a case is that the provider loses its shield against liability for removing content. If the poster can show damage, and can also show an obligation to host the content, s/he could sue the provider for failing to restore the content. But in the common case where the provider has no duty to host any particular content, or has reserved the right to take down any content at any time for any reason, there would be no liability, and so no penalty for failing to restore content. In practice, only where a provider is required by a contract to host the content is a suit plausible, and then only if the poster can show damage from the content being taken down. So in practice, there may well be little change. The Wikipedia article on the case says: Others have observed that the practical effect is minimal, since although the turnaround time for a registration with the Copyright Office can be months at a time, the Office offers an $800 expedited review process for cases with &quot;compelling needs&quot; like upcoming lawsuits, and offers preregistration for categories of works more likely to be infringed. Moreover, plaintiffs can recover for any losses accrued from infringement, even while waiting for the examination to be complete. The decision applies only to filing copyright litigation, and does not apply to other forms of enforcement, such as sending demand letters or issuing DMCA Section 512 takedown notices. In an article about the case posted on scotusblog.com, Jessica Litman says: The opinion resolves a longstanding circuit split, but the practical implications may be modest. The decision may encourage some copyright owners to register their claims promptly, may reduce forum shopping, may delay some infringement suits for several months and may deter plaintiffs from including peripheral copyright infringement claims in suits over other disputes in order to brandish the threat of large copyright damage awards.
There's a legal issue, and a practical issue. If you witness a crime, you can inform the police and something may happen. The FBI does actually investigate criminal copyright infringement, but they also don't respond to concerned-citizen complaints, only complaints of copyright holders (and not all of them). You cannot use DMCA takedown to get the service provider to remove the content (or shut down the site, or whatever would be necessary), since only the copyright holder can make the required sworn statements. So you have no legal recourse. A practical solution is to tell Google. This link could have been a way to inform them, but it seems to always resolve to identifying plausible DMCA takedown requests, and if you truthfully answer the &quot;are you the copyright holder&quot; question, you are told to go away. Even if you lie at the preliminary stage, the procedure ends with you making a sworn statement, and you can't lie on one of those. This information might allow you to send them a letter, which they might read. They might simply not consider it worth their time.
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.
It is hard to say: this article sketches the legal landscape. So-called deep linking that bypasses the main page for a site is not believed to be infringement, following the reasoning of Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc., 508 F.3d 1146. The URL itself does not have the bare minimum of creativity required for copyright protection, and storing a URL on a computer is not storing the contents that it refers to, so no copy was made in violation of copyright law. It is unlikely that competing theories would develop in other US districts (there don't appear to be any at the present). However, such a link could create secondary liability for infringement, see Erickson Productions, Inc. v. Kast, where a party &quot;has knowledge of another’s infringement and (2) either (a) materially contributes to or (b) induces that infringement&quot;. If I link to a file on a pirate website, I am secondarily liable for that infringement. However, if I link to a legally-uploaded file which the author did not intend to make public, there is no infringement. Copyright law requires permission of the copyright owner, which is more than just &quot;explicit denial&quot;. The problem is that a person can put a file out there and not say one way or the other whether you have permission to copy the file. The US Copyright office says that &quot;A copyright owner must have expressly or implicitly authorized users to make retainable copies of a work by downloading, printing, or other means for the work to be considered published&quot; (let's not care at the moment whether it is important to be &quot;published&quot;). The court may infer implicit permission from a copyright owner's conduct, but there is no rule &quot;if it's on the internet, you've granted permission&quot;. A rights-owner may make a valiant but insufficient effort to block access to the work (except via a password), so in that context, the courts would infer that the rights-owner had not given permission, therefore the copying is infringing and you have secondary liability for your direct link to the material.
Video would not be transformed in any way, and discussion would take place on reddit or other discussion platforms. So you are copying someone else's video and reposting it verbatim and in full in vimeo, without adding any additional content of your own? What is even the need for it? If you want to discuss the video in Reddit or similar, you can link to the original video instead of your copy. The usual way that fair use is used is when you include the relevants parts of the work being criticized as part of your video. There are other points to take into consideration; IP lawsuits are very specific of the details of the works involved (for examples it could be easier to consider fair use the inclusion of the full original work if it were a short one that if it were a long one) so it is difficult to give an absolute "yes" or "no" answer. But what you attempt to do seems highly problematic. If your argument were valid, what would prevent me from setting an URL to download the latest Hollywood blockbuster because I am commenting about it on Reddit? Imagine that I start selling copies of "The Avengers XXII: A day at the Park"1 adding just a note at the end saying "I like this movie, but they played frisbee a lot too much" as opinion/commentary/criticism... do you think that it would qualify as "fair use"?2 Coupled with the fact that it seems that copying the video seems not necessary for commenting on it (again, just link to the source) I would consider more prudent3 not copying it. 1Well, technically I would say that I were selling my opinion (which is perfectly legal), with the film included only as "fair use" to provide context to my opinion. 2Answer: No, it would not. 3I am not a lawyer, I am not your lawyer, and this site does not provide legal advice.
Yes and no. [note, the following is all written about US law. In other jurisdictions laws are, of course, different (though usually not drastically so.)] In the US there are (at least) three different bodies of law that might apply to code: copyright, patents, trade secrets. Copyright covers original expression. Anything you write is automatically, immediately protected under copyright. The copyright applies to the code itself, and anything "derived" from that code. It's up to the courts to decide exactly what "derived" means. One case that's long been viewed as a landmark in this area is Gates Rubber v. Bando Chemicals. The Court of Appeals for the tenth Circuit decision includes a section titled: "The Test for Determining Whether the Copyright of a Computer Program Has Been Infringed." Note that you can register a copyright, and that can be worthwhile, such as helping recover some damages you can't otherwise. Patents are quite different from copyrights. Where a copyright covers expression of an idea, a patent covers a specific invention. Rather than being awarded automatically, a patent has to be applied for, and awarded only after the patent office has determined that there's no relevant prior art to prevent it from being awarded. A patent, however, covers things like somebody else independently discovering/inventing what's covered by the patent. A trade secret could (at least theoretically) apply to some process or procedure embodied in the code. A trade secret mostly applies to a situation where (for example) you're trying to form an alliance with some other company, and in the process tell them things you don't tell the general public. If you've identified the fact that what you're telling them is a trade secret, and they then tell a competitor (or the general public, etc.) or more generally use that information in any way other than the originally intended purpose, it could constitute a trade secret violation. As a side-note: patents and copyright fall under federal law, so they're basically uniform nation-wide. Trade secrets mostly fall under state law, so the exact details vary by state. Absent a reason to believe otherwise, I'd guess your interest here is primarily in copyright infringement. The key here would be showing that one piece of code was derived from the other. That is, it specifically would not apply in a case where there were only a limited number of ways of doing something, so anybody who wanted to do that had to use one of those ways. Since this would not indicate actual derivation, it would not indicate copyright violation.
It does not matter whether the document is authentic, because it is true, by law. Under copyright law, you must have permission of the copyright holder to copy any protected work (original creative work not created as a work of the US, as an example under US law). This is true whether or not the copyright holder tells you that copying requires permission. A matter for more concern is &quot;false permission&quot;, where a person without the right to grant permission utters something that the courts would usually interpret as being &quot;permission&quot;, for example releasing a Harry Potter book under CC-0. The legal requirement is that you have actual permission, not that a prohibition was not communicated to you. It is in your interest to know whether the actual person making available a work under some license actually has the right to grant a license. But there is no way to know for certain who holds copyright. You can, however, attempt to determine that a work has been registered with the US copyright office, looking here. Works are still protected when not registered, so failing to find a copyright registration does not guarantee that the work is &quot;open access&quot;. It would tell you who the registered copyright holder is. There is no &quot;innocent infringement&quot; defense, but under §504(c)(2), your liability for statutory damages can be reduced to as little as $200, if you can prove that there were no indications that the work is protected.
Yes. It is legal to update the copyright automatically. It is also legal to put the wrong year, whether it is 100 years ago, or 100 years in the future. (See 17 USC 406, which explains that an error in the date is only relevant for works published prior to March 1, 1989.) Today, you can put whatever you'd like there, as the copyright notice on a website has very little legal meaning. There are 2 main reasons for this: All content is automatically copyright protected whether you specify the copyright or not. (United States Copyright Office: Copyright Notices: "U.S. law no longer requires the use of a copyright notice") It's common knowledge that it is extremely easy to update a website and its content, so if you ever get into a legal battle where you need to prove which party created something first, the copyright date written on a website will not be considered valid evidence. Other mechanisms will need to be used, such as registered copyright or perhaps even code vaults with a trusted 3rd party. However, by displaying a proper copyright notice, "the court will not give any weight to a defendant’s use of an innocent infringement defense". (Copyright notices) That being said, what should you do? The most popular options are: Don't display a copyright notice at all. Display copyright without a year. Display the current year. Display a range from the first publish year to the current year. Display the year of last content publish. Note that the last option (display the year of the last content publish) is what some copyright experts still recommend today. But IMHO that is an outdated practice and is pointless. If your site has 1000 webpages on it, and you add one more page this year and update the site-wide copyright year along with it, that obviously does not reset the true copyright year of the other 1000 pages. Also, some people believe that a website with a copyright year older than the current year makes the site appear stale, which may hurt the site's reputation. If you feel that your website could fall into that category, then an auto-update or no year at all is probably the best way to go.