Antitrust laws violation for Twitter card I'm a Website developer and this question is about Twitter Player Card. For most websites, Twitter cards are not shown expanded on the feed. Indeed a link on the bottom right of my tweet that reads 'View details' (or 'view photo', or others depending on the card type). For big Websites like SoundCloud, Reverbnation Vine etc. is totally different, as you can see down below in the picture. My question: Isn't it an antitrust violation to facilitate in this way only some websites at the expense of others? What my small website looks like on timeline: And what SoundCloud looks like: This facilitate enormously big companies at the expense of others, everyone wants to share with SoundCloud not with anything else it seems pretty obvious. Do you think there are requirements to proceed with a class-action?
tl;dr: It seems doubtful an antitrust claim would succeed. Twitter would likely file a motion to dismiss under Fed. Rules. of Civ. Pro 12(b)(6) for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted. To your benefit, the judge would tend to construe all of your factual allegations as true (i.e. that Twitter excludes some websites but not others). Then, given this construction it would ask whether your claim is "plausible on its face," where plausibility means "pleaded factual content allows the court to draw the reasonable inference that the defendant is liable for the misconduct alleged." Bell Atlantic v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544 (2007). Note, in this second step, we're not only looking for factual sufficiency, but also legal sufficiency. The antitrust claim would likely falter for lack of legal sufficiency. Your legal sufficiency would need to come from an alleged violation, so say you alleged an antitrust violation under Section 1 of the Sherman Act (15 U.S.C. §§ 1-7, amended at 12-27). In this case, you'd want to show 1) an agreement 2) that unreasonably restrains competition and 3) impacts interstate commerce. If there isn't an agreement (e.g. Twitter just chooses to plug SoundCloud), that makes antitrust success even less likely, so imagine you were able to show evidence of an agreement. Then the trouble would be showing this is an unreasonable restraint of competition. Antitrust is a really complicated field, but the short version is: partnership and product placement agreements aren't necessarily violations of antitrust law---especially when the companies aren't in the same market. While there certainly differences, your question is similar (from a legal concepts perspective) to the one LetsListen informally made with respect to Facebook. Aside: another issue is that a Twitter--SoundCloud collaboration isn't a within-market merger, which means the usual antitrust analysis in the Horizontal Merger Guidelines doesn't translate perfectly. united-states
A simple EULA does not absolve you from legal responsibility. The law that you need to be acquainted with, if you are dealing with the US (i.e. might be sued in the US), is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, in particular Title II, the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act which states the "safe harbor" provisions. Aspects of DMCA safe harbor are covered in many Law SE questions. In essence, you have to provide a way for rights holders to complain that someone has infringed their copyright on there site, and you have to take down allegedly infringing material: and there are a number of legal formalities to attend to in doing this. The main point is that you can't just ignore the problem and hope it goes away, and you can't just say it is not your responsibility, which is what a simple EULA does. To be protected, you need a "designated agent" where complainers can contact you. You provide the information online (as well as stating the DMCA policy, which can be in the EULA), and also register that information with the Copyright office (online). The complaint has to be in writing, and most of the burden is on the author of the complaint, but you still have to be sure that the complaint is legally conforming. The complaint has to say what was infringed (e.g. the URL), the identity of the protected content (title of the book, for instance), and provide the complainer's signature and contact information. It also requires the complainer to say that they have a good faith belief that the material is illegally copied (no permission, and not otherwise allowed by law), and a perjury statement that the foregoing is accurate and authorized by the copyright holder. When you have a conforming notice, you must "expeditiously" remove / disable the infringing material (there is no definition of "expeditious"), notify the user, then wait for a proper counter-claim (same general form as the take-down claim but where the user denies the posting the material was illegal. If you get a counter-claim, you notify the alleged copyright owner and wait for them to file suit in 10 days. If they don't do that, you restore the material. Here is a sample complaint, and a sample counter notice. Also, this document (look for the download tab) reorganizes the legal language so that requirements are put in logical order and not randomly scattered throughout the US Code.
In my opinion, you are totally free to publish the information. There are two areas of law that can be cosidered - private and public law. In the private law area, you can be liable for revealing trade secrets, but only if you agreed to keep them by a contract. Trade secrets do not exist by themselves (there are minor exceptions, eg. in competition law, but those do not concern us), they must be protected by contracts. Another private limitations, like libel laws, won't apply here. This is not uncommon, but not in cars - you can find clauses like these in software license agreements. Then there is the public area. Is there any regulation, any policy of the state, that prevents you from publishing it? I am not aware you whole legal code of your state, but I doubt there is. It would be a harsh limitation of freedom of speech. Even if the modification could lead to illegal effect (like, modifying toy weapon to kill by rising its power...) it would be only illegal under very rare circumstances. To conclude it - freedom of speech can be limited only if there is sufficient public interest to do so, and I don't see any.
Nobody know what constitutes "scamming", because it's not a legal concept. There is no sense in which receiving a gift itself constitutes "scamming". Since scamming is vaguely about dishonesty, there is an imaginable scenario where you could be liable for a false representation, for example if you impersonated someone else in order to receive something of value, you could be prosecuted in California. You should not assume that a police officer saying "That's not our problem" is proof that you committed no crime or civil tort. Your lawyer can give you advice as to whether you have anything to worry about, legally. The other stuff about being called a scammer or having pictures posted might be a violation of Facebook's TOS, and you can always complain to Facebook central authorities. Technically, uploading a picture that someone took is a violation of copyright law, if you didn't give permission to do so. It might run afoul of some state~provincial or national privacy law, depending on where this takes place.
There's usually at least a little wiggle room for a fair-use argument in copyright law, but as you're describing it, this sounds like a pretty straightforward copyright violation. A copyright holder's exclusive rights include the rights to make copies, create derivative works and publicly perform the work. Whichever way you want to characterize the podcaster's conduct, he's running afoul of at least one of these rights.
The legal ground is to identify infringers of their copyright. Copyright law prohibits unauthorized copying, and Twitter alleges that there was unauthorized copying, which included downloading. They have a legal right to file legal actions against any and all infringers, and the subpoena process is a means of determining the true identity of the alleged infringers (since real identities are needed to sue them).
It's possible that CAD has a separate licence from the authors of ABC that allows them to produce a closed source copy. If not, they have no right to distribute CAD. However two wrongs don't make a right, and so you don't get to violate the copyright of CAD.* Unfortunately, unless you are one of the authors of ABC, you have no standing to sue the authors of CAD. You can only notify the authors of ABC and hope they do. If the authors of ABC don't have the resources to pursue the matter, you may be out of luck. That's one of the reasons the FSF gets copyright assignments for their projects. * It turns out that this is a much more debateable issue than I first thought. Some courts have held that an unauthorized derivative work is not copyrightable.
The theoretical is that the domain slutsofinstagram.com does dilute or harm Instagram's mark because of the use of "Instagram" in the domain and because of the unwanted association of the parody story; that's the theory and "grounds" that Instagram would use in their lawsuit. Instagram would have to prove their theory of dilution or harm to the jury or judge, and convince either that the harm is not theoretical but real and financially damaging in order to win their case. The owners of slutsofinstagram.com would have to defend themselves and argue that they are not damaging Instagram's mark and their parody is a parody and is protected as such. Any actual court outcome is also theoretical. If Instagram won their case, one of the legal remedies could be the court ordering the owner of slutsofinstagram.com to transfer ownership of the domain to Instagram so they could simply park the domain and effectively take down the parody story. Or, the owner of slutsofinstagram.com could prevail because they argued the fact - and the court agreed - that the domain name and creative contents of the site is a parody and is protected speech and doesn't dilute Instagram's mark because any reasonable person could see that the site is a parody and not related to Instagram. In the US, a possible example of a parody not diluting a mark is L.L. Bean, Inc. v. Drake Publishers, Inc., 811 F.2d 26 (1st Cir. 1987), where Imitation may be the highest form of flattery, but plaintiff-appellee L.L. Bean, Inc., was neither flattered nor amused when High Society magazine published a prurient parody of Bean's famous catalog. The reality is that Instagram can contest the use of slutsofinstagram.com because they can; they have deep pockets and can take the owner of slutsofinstagram.com to court, like any other trademark holder can contest another's trademark. The owner of slutsofinstagram.com would have to defend themselves in court, or settle - possibly for monetary damages or the ownership of the domain or use of slutsofinstagram - and not go to court. It's possible that the SLAPP (Strategic lawsuit against public participation - Wikipedia) California law could help the plaintiff defend themselves against a deep pocket lawsuit designed to kill the parody site - as the suit would be "intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition" - which could happen because Instagram is part of Facebook and is incorporated in California. But basically, in the legal world, one man's litigation bully is another man's trademark protection hero. This concerns the US. As always, your mileage may vary due to jurisdiction and national/international laws and agreements concerning trademarks.