Posts Tagged ‘copyright infringement’
Rapidshare Scores Another Win Towards Film Studio
RapidShare takes all reasonable measures to prevent movies from being distributed through its web-service, a German court ruled yesterday. The Higher Regional Court of Dsseldorf overturned the earlier decision of a local district court in a second case brought by movie outfit Capelight Pictures.
Like most file-hosting services, RapidShare hosts a wide range of movies, music and software files that are distributed without the consent of the rightsholders. This situation has caused the company to be dragged to court on multiple occasions, but the file-hoster has come out the winner several times already.
In May this year, the United States District Court of California ruled that RapidShare is not guilty of copyright infringement. In a hearing closer to home for the Swiss company, a German court ruled in the same month that RapidShare cannot be held not liable for acts of copyright infringement committed by its users.
In a related case in Germany against the movie studio Capelight Pictures, RapidShare has booked another success after a lower court initially ruled against the file-hoster last year. RapidShare successfully appealed against a preliminary injunction granted by the Dsseldorf Regional Court, and the Higher Regional Court of Dsseldorf has now reversed the decision.
The dispute between Capelight Pictures and the file-hoster dealt with the question of whether RapidShare had undertaken all reasonable measures to counter the illegal distribution of one of the films owned by the movie outfit in Germany. While the lower court ruled RapidShare did not, the Higher Regional Court of Dsseldorf overturned this decision.
The ruling is a further step in the right direction, sad RapidShare lawyer Daniel Raimer. The previously common practice of copyright holders [suing] RapidShare on the off-chance there might be something to be gained from it, misunderstanding the realities it is operating within and showing contempt for its business model, will no longer bear fruit. The newest court rulings in Germany and the USA indicate this very clearly.
Christian Schmid, founder and CEO of RapidShare, commented: We are also pleased with the ruling because it is connected to a claim for compensation of costs. Copyright holders should therefore think very carefully in future about whether they wouldnt prefer to save themselves some time and above all the expense of suing RapidShare for something for which the company cannot be held liable.
Together with the positive outcomes from the other court cases this year, RapidShare has less to worry about on the legal front in the future. The verdicts are undoubtedly a major victory for RapidShare, and they will also reflect positively on other file-hosters and even torrent sites. In fact, many of the arguments used by the Court also hold for the average torrent site, as long as they stay away from other means of facilitating copyright infringement.
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Courtroom Bans The Pirate Bay From The Netherlands
In a full trial the Amsterdam Court has confirmed an earlier judgment and ordered The Pirate Bay to stop all their activities in The Netherlands. The Court ruled that the sites operators were assisting copyright infringement. If the three operators fail to ban Dutch users, they will have to pay penalties of 50,000 euros per day.
In an attempt to ensure that Dutch citizens cant access The Pirate Bay, Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN took three of the trackers founders to court last summer.
The anti-piracy group won the case and Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Peter Sunde were ordered to block Dutch users, a decision they decided to appeal.
In the verdict of the initial appeal, the Court ruled that The Pirate Bay had to remove a list of torrents linking to copyrighted works and make their website inaccessible to Dutch visitors. This ruling was confirmed yesterday in a full trial by the Amsterdam Court.
The judge ruled that The Pirate Bay itself is not necessarily guilty of copyright infringement. However, according to the Court, the sites operators assist in copyright infringement by allowing and encouraging its users to share torrents.
Previously, the defendants had argued that they were not the owners of the site, but a Seychelles-based company named Reservella. The Court rejected this defense as the defendants could not name the current owners or provide any documents proving that the site was sold. It concluded that the three defendants are responsible for the site.
In an appeal of one of the earlier cases against BREIN the defendants hired a lawyer to represent them, but in the full trial the defendants did not show up or defend themselves.
The Amsterdam Court ruled that Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter will now have to pay penalties of 50,000 euros per day if they dont comply. However, based on their previous inaction and the claims that they are no longer responsible for The Pirate Bay, it is unlikely that Dutch users will be cut off.
The worrying thing for other BitTorrent site owners is that BREIN might use this case as a precedent in an attempt to get other big torrent sites offline. If thats the case, the effects of the current judgement might be more severe that they appear at the moment.
In the meantime, BREIN has been anticipating and making the best of The Pirate Bays lack of response by starting a lawsuit against Dutch ISP Ziggo, demanding it blocks user access to The Pirate Bay website.
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“canadian Dmca” Legalizes Cd Ripping, Mashups, Backups
Canada’s long-awaited copyright modernization bill appeared today. If passed, it would explicitly legalize DVRs, YouTube mashups, backups, and parodiesand it would slap strong, US-style restrictions on bypassing DRM.
Forget fair dealing; as in the US, digital locks trump all.
The good, the bad, the ugly
Last time around, Canada’s tough attempt at reforming its copyright laws fell apart over widespread public anger. The country learned its lesson, eventually embarking on a lengthy public consultation process before trying again.
The product of those consultations dropped today in the form of Bill C-32 (read a leaked version). It provides a host of welcome changes to Canadian law and legalizes behavior that Canadians have been engaging in for years.
The highlights:
Time-shifting. It’s finally legal, though with an odd caveat: “the individual keeps the recording no longer than is reasonably necessary in order to listen to or view the program at a more convenient time.” In other words, no long-term archiving. Also, no giving recordings away.
Format-shifting. Ripping CDsfinally, unambiguously legal! You need to own the original source material.
Backups. They’re now legal for all digital works, though you can’t bypass DRM to make one and the source must be a legitimate copy.
Statutory damage distinctions. Statutory damages now apply differently to non-commercial infringers and range from CAN$100 to CAN$5,000 in such cases. Commercial infringers can be hit with up to CAN$20,000 per infringement. Compare this to the US, where willful infringement can hit $150,000 even for noncommercial use.
Mashups. C-32 contains a section on “Non-commercial User-generated content” that makes mashups legal, even when they use copyrighted content. So long as they are noncommercial, mention the original creator (when “reasonable in the circumstances to do so”), and don’t have a “substantial adverse effect” on the market for the original work.
Temporary copies. The bill would legalize most temporary copies made by technical processes, such as caches and fleeting copies existing only in RAM.
Parody. Canada’s limited fair dealing rights get a boost, with named copyright exceptions for “research, private study, education, parody, or satire.”
When it comes to ISP liability, the bill skips the US “notice-and-takedown” model found in the DMCA. Instead, it codifies a “notice-and-notice” regime. If a rightsholder sends a copyright infringement letter to an ISP, the ISP does not need to take down or block access to that content; instead, the ISP need only forward the notice to the subscriber in question. This keeps the dispute over infringement between the two main parties, and keeps ISPs from getting involved.
The bill also ratchets up enforcement against P2P sites. “It is an infringement of copyright for a person to provide,” says the bill, “by means of the Internet or another digital network, a service that the person knows or should have known is designed primarily to enable acts of copyright infringement if an actual infringement of copyright occurs by means of the Internet or another digital network as a result of the use of that service.”
But the big new enforcement piece is the DMCA-style DRM provisions. Bypassing DRM won’t be allowed except in a few narrow cases. Just as in the US, the bill makes no exception for legal uses; DRM trumps fair dealing. Circumvention software and devices would also become illegal to sell or distribute.
It’s this provision that incenses copyright critics like law professor Michael Geist, who otherwise has a positive take on the bill.
“In other words, in the battle between two sets of property rights – those of the intellectual property rights holder and those of the consumer who has purchased the tangible or intangible property – the IP rights holder always wins,” he writes.
“This represents market intervention for a particular business model by a government supposedly committed to the free market and it means that the existing fair dealing rights (including research, private study, news reporting, criticism, and review) and the proposed new rights (parody, satire, education, time shifting, format shifting, backup copies) all cease to function effectively so long as the rights holder places a digital lock on their content or device. “
The bill remains open to amendment as it moves through the legislative sausage grinder. Canadians who care about these issues would be well-advised to contact their MPs quickly, perhaps noting that ratifying the 1996 WIPO Internet Treaties (one big goal of C-32) does not actually require this sort of approach to DRM.