Fair Use and DMCA My project (EditVideoBot) is an automated 'Twitter bot' program that allows users to edit videos within Twitter (they can add music to the video, or their own text, etc). My first account I ran this project on was suspended at 31,000 followers after being pursued by UMG and Sony with their DMCA complaints, regarding music that my program added to some videos. I'm just a 15 year old student developer, but I'm looking to find out what I can do in order to prevent things like this from happening. It seems that everything I've tried hasn't worked. I should also note that this isn't a commercial project, it's just a hobby of mine. Here's what I've tried so far: Submitting DMCA counter-notices to Twitter In these counter notices, I've given all the required statements, as well as extra detail into their Fair Use Policy, explaining that my program is compliant with all the points detailed at that link. Twitter says the following in their emails when they confirm they've received my counter-notice and forwarded it to the complainant: If we don’t receive a notice from the complainant within 10 business days, we’ll cease withholding the material. The complainant’s notice must confirm that they’ve sought a court order to restrain you from engaging in infringing activity relating to content on Twitter. In every case where I've received this email, I have never received a further notice from the complainant, but Twitter never ceased withholding the material after 10 business days either. I receive no further communications from both Twitter and the complainant. There's no proper formal way for me to directly contact Twitter that I know of - communication is basically one-way. Contacting the complainant directly This turned out very bad. Not only did I receive no reply back from them, they then appeared to increase the number of DMCA complaints my account got. I was receiving at least 5 complaints a day from then on - way faster than I could counter them. Within a matter of days after contacting them, my account was just automatically suspended by Twitter - no way to counter it, nothing. I tried submitting counter-notices after my account's suspension, but I never even received a single email back. So I have 2 questions: Am I in the right here? I clearly have no commercial or malicious intent to violate copyright laws. The material uploaded by the program is very short and insubstantial. Everything it uploads has zero impact on the original work's value. It's pretty easy to tell that just by visiting my account and looking at its content. What further action can I take in order to prevent this from happening in the future (and perhaps get my original account back)? I've just added a feature that automatically processes the audio to check if it contains proper music, and then gives credit to the record label it belongs to. Would that help in mitigating further complaints? AFAIK, Fair Use isn't a law, so I'm not sure I can counter the takedowns based on that. What else can I do? It's pretty crappy that they're trying to ruin someone's fun hobby while actual PIRACY is so rampant. There has to be something I can do. I appreciate any advice. Thanks in advance! Edit: I don't see why my program would be considered a 'piracy tool' when a program such as youtube-dl (which is in fact the tool my program utilises in order to download music) is able to successfully be reinstated after a DMCA complaint from the RIAA. Doesn't that program enable users to download copyrighted material from YouTube and other sites? Just because a tool could potentially be used to violate the DMCA, does that mean it can get taken down? Not in youtube-dl's case, and I don't see a difference with mine. How could anything helping users to add music not be used to facilitate adding without consent? I like what @josh3736 referenced (from the Betamax case) and I think it's a good response: the business of supplying the equipment that makes such copying feasible should not be stifled simply because the equipment is used by some individuals to make unauthorized reproductions of respondents' works.... EditVideoBot is an automated program that automatically edits videos based on commands provided by other Twitter users that mention the account - I am providing the service, other people operate and produce the material with it. I don't see why I need to take the fall. Is my program not just one that provides a video editing service? It's purpose is not to infringe on any laws. Edit #2: I just got my first ever reply back from Twitter saying they ceased withholding a video from my account! Maybe Twitter's counter-notice process is just really slow, but hopefully this means that I get more soon!
Twitter don’t have to host your account UMG’s and Sony’s business is probably more important to Twitter than yours is. It seems Twitter have made a commercial decision to close your account down. They can do this: We may suspend or terminate your account or cease providing you with all or part of the Services at any time for any or no reason, … What’s happening is not fair use Fair use is a lot narrower than you think it is. UMG and Sony (and every other music label) get paid when people use their music on a commercial platform like Twitter. Which means, you enabling people to avoid this is directly reducing their market so this is not fair use. Giving credit does not help. Now, if your program blocked the use of copyrighted songs that might be ok. Your program looks exactly like a piracy tool I’m sure you have the best intentions but your tool readily enables copyright violations by others. That’s moving out of the realms of civil breach and into possible criminal sanctions. I wouldn’t push this if I were you. Your understanding of copyright is flawed This video is a good primer on copyright.
Public domain means that there is no (longer) copyright in the given work. This means that all rights associated with copyright are not controlled by anyone and there is no way to run afoul of copyright laws (note that in some countries a true &quot;public domain&quot; doesn't exist). Assuming you're correct that these works are in public domain, answers to your particular questions are: Does that mean I can play the video's as much as I want to any size crowd I wanted? Could I charge money to watch the videos? Yes and yes. If something is in the public domain does that mean all the parts of that thing are? This kind of begs the question. A work in public domain has no copyright in it. If one of its part has copyright, then it's not really public domain is it? What about the characters in the videos, could I make a new Bugs Bunny or Might Mouse animation on my own? If I wanted to use Popeye or Betty Boop or daffy duck in a video game could I? Copyright isn't your issue here, trademarks are. The characters are most likely trademarked, meaning you generally can't use them in your own works without licensing.
There are several things going on with Akinator and their use of trademarked names and characters. If you look at akinator.com Legal Notices it says: 2 – Copyright – Reproduction rights All the content of this site falls under French and international legislation on copyright and intellectual property. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part of this website, in any form or by any means is strictly prohibited without prior authorisation of the publications director. All products and trademarks mentioned are property of their respective owners. (emphasis mine) The fact that they mention that all trademarks belong to their respective owners is good, but it's a formality. What it appears the site really relies on for use of trademarked characters is what's called Nominative Use, which is a type of "trademark fair use." The product or service cannot be readily identified without using the trademark (e.g. trademark is descriptive of a person, place, or product attribute). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use Akinator has to use the names and trademarks to identify those names and trademarks. Akinator could possibly be sued to establish their type of fair use is not valid in their case, but it's probably not worth it for the companies to pursue. And, most companies would rather people use and see their trademarks in a marketing and money-making fair use sense rather than sue to stop their use. See In the US, when is fair use a defense to copyright infringement? for a full description of Fair Use. Now, when you get to the "answer" part of the game, you will see a "copyright" link. Part of that resulting page says Displayed pictures are accessible from the web. It is Elokence's policy to respond to notices of alleged copyright infringement that comply with applicable international intellectual property law and make the necessary changes. In respect of Elokence's Intellectual Property Policy, Elokence operates a complaints procedure accessible via the form below. So the company has given itself a further bit of protection by only using images on the web they can link to (at least in the web browser game; I don't know about the App), so that means the image is already "out there", uploaded by someone else, and Akinator can claim they didn't upload it. And, further, there is a contact form for trademark holders to send DMCA takedown notices for their work. It's a belt and suspenders approach to the use of trademarks in their game.
Is it legal to make a video compilation of websites that use our product for promotion of our company? [...] We would only be showing brief clips of client's products, strung together for a short video. This will most probably be both copyright violation and trademark infringement. Copyright is generally violated if you copy a creative work produced by someone else - which is what you want to do. Trademarks are generally violated when you use someone else's trademarks (such as their logo or company name) to promote your product - which, again is what you want to do. There are various exceptions available - copyright may not apply if the work is very simple, trademark use may be allowed e.g. in comparative advertising, etc., etc., but the rules for this are complex, unclear and very different in various jurisdictions. You could risk it and hope no one sues you (and maybe no one will), but the safe route is to ask permission first.
Yes, you did something wrong; you used both the university's trade mark and copyright without their permission. I don't know the law in India, however, if it is similar to Australia it is unlikely that the police will be interested in doing anything about it. While it is technically a crime, criminal prosecution is usually reserved for egregious breaches on a for profit basis. I suggest you apologise and agree to stop distributing your app.
The first question is whose law you are concerned with, since in principle you might have violated copyright law in any country, and might be sued under the laws of multiple countries. The US has a concept of "fair use" which is notoriously difficult to apply. When you are sued in the US, you can defend against the allegation by arguing certain things: telegraphically, this includes purpose and character of use, nature of the work, substantiality in relation to the whole, and effect on market. Plus there is a 5th factor to be considered, transformativeness. The court then weighs these factors to decide if the use is "fair". By reading existing case law on the topic (conveniently available from the US Copyright office) you might develop a fact-based opinion of the risk: you would be vastly better off hiring an attorney who specializes in US copyright law to do an analysis for you. Do not hire a programmer to give you legal advice (do not hire an attorney to debug code). You would "fail" on the test of substantiality in that you are copying a highly substantial portion of the original work(s). You would "win" on nature of use (research especially non-profit and commentary are the underlying purposes that drive fair use law). It's not clear how you would fare w.r.t. nature of the work, which is intended to distinguish the extremes "news report" and "literature and artistic work" where copying news is at the fair use end of the spectrum. It is not clear how you would fare on "effect on market", but probably not so badly: are you avoiding some licensing fee? Coupled with the tranformativeness consideration, you are most likely having no effect on the market, since the product that you will distribute is not the original work, but a scientific conclusion about the work. Germany has different laws, and this article would be relevant if you cared about Germany. There was a change in the law that expanded the analog of fair use pertaining to research use. That law allows 15 percent of a work to be reproduced, distributed and made available to the public for the purpose of non-commercial scientific research. That, b.t.w., does not refer to what you are planning to do (unless you also publish quotes); for personal scientific research you may reproduce up to 75 percent. Since this is a new law only a year old, you could become part of the cutting edge in testing the limits of the law. So the standard disclaimer applies: ask your attorney. But note section 60d of the law which legalized data mining, and is squarely on point: (1) In order to enable the automatic analysis of large numbers of works (source material) for scientific research, it shall be permissible to reproduce the source material, including automatically and systematically, in order to create, particularly by means of normalisation, structuring and categorisation, a corpus which can be analysed and to make the corpus available to the public for a specifically limited circle of persons for their joint scientific research, as well as to individual third persons for the purpose of monitoring the quality of scientific research. In such cases, the user may only pursue non-commercial purposes. (2) If database works are used pursuant to subsection (1), this shall constitute customary use in accordance with section 55a, first sentence. If insubstantial parts of databases are used pursuant to subsection (1), this shall be deemed consistent with the normal utilisation of the database and with the legitimate interests of the producer of the database within the meaning of section 87b (1), second sentence, and section 87e. (3) Once the research work has been completed, the corpus and the reproductions of the source material shall be deleted; they may no longer be made available to the public. It shall, however, be permissible to transmit the corpus and the reproductions of the source material to the institutions referred to in sections 60e and 60f for the purpose of long-term storage.
There are multiple issues with what you are trying to do, including issues with copyright, personality rights, and data protection. You are trying to use other people's content and likeness for your advertisement. Unless you are certain that you can do this in your relevant jurisdictions, without their consent, this sounds like a very bad idea. At least under GDPR, “but they made it public” is not an excuse. Personal data is personal data regardless of how you acquire it. The GDPR also has a very broad concept of identifiability that goes beyond direct identifiers or PII. If you want to use other people's personal data, you need a legal basis, and must provide them notice about your processing. Consent (informed opt-in) is one legal basis, legitimate interest (opt-out) another. You are suggesting to avoid this by blurring PII, but you may also have to blur other content that is indirectly identifiable. Real anonymization that meets the GDPR's definition is a really hard problem. In some cases, a legitimate interest is able to avoid such problems. E.g. if I make a video with commentary about a Tweet, it would likely be OK to show surrounding personal data like the responses including the identities of the various accounts, to the degree that this is relevant to the commentary and/or necessary for proper attribution. However, that commentary likely has strong protections under freedom of expression. At least from an European viewpoint, a tutorial, demo, or advertisement would not have a freedom of expression argument that would shift a GDPR legitimate interest balancing test in your favour. Instead of blurring almost everything in your video or working on GDPR compliance, content licenses, and release forms, you should consider a different solution: create dummy content just for your videos. You can use your own content, and maybe add a dummy profile.
It is, in most jurisdictions, not a crime to download YouTube videos. For criminal law, the answer is that it is not illegal. In many jurisdictions, downloading music or video of any kind from the internet is not a crime. Thus, police has no power to punish you for downloading, and even less power to shutdown such "downloader" websites. YouTube's Terms of Service seem to disallow such downloads so YouTube has the right to terminate the agreement with the downloader. They may prevent you from viewing any more videos, for example. However, I think Google does not even have a technical measure in place to do that. Google is not interested in preventing you from using YouTube (its servers can handle that) and that is pretty much the only punishment it can use. Google could use the Terms of Services to say that the downloader-websites are breaking them and thus should not have access to YouTube. The websites could be sued for breaking the Terms of Services (and the court could order them to stop) and Google can block those websites from accessing YouTube by technical measures. It appears it did so in at least one case. Google could sue you (or the websites) for advertisement revenue loss, but it is unlikely. In theory, Google loses advertisement revenue from the video playbacks you would have done on YouTube but did not play because you downloaded the video and played it offline (contrary to the Terms of Service). Google might attempt to sue a downloader website on this basis and try to make it give it money. It would be difficult for Google to prove that it deserves such money, though. I cannot imagine how it would prove that "you would have played the video online, again, with advertisements, if you didn't download it. Note that when you replay a video from browser cache, advertisements do not replay. Why Google doesn't sue downloader-website more often? It's expensive. Google could pay a lot of money to shut down a website via court order but if it really wants to do so, they can apply a technical measure (such as IP block) instead. It is much cheaper and has the same effect. This may change in the near future. There's a some talk around about European court rulings and directives that may change this. It is quite possible that in the near future, even viewing illegally uploaded music on YouTube will be criminal. I find this doubtful because of the difficulty of proving knowledge ("How was I supposed to know that it wasn't an official clip?"). As for whether downloading to a file (as opposed to downloading to the browser cache) will become criminal, I really doubt that.