ARTS & FARCES internet

Online publication Huffington Post, backed by beaucoup venture capital, stands accused of stealing content from other online publications. The publication is the house organ for political chameleon Arianna Huffington.

Online publishing etiquette has traditionally honored a “summarize and link” behavior when referring to existing content but Chicago Reader editor Whet Moser asserts the Huffington Post lifted entire articles. Not for the core Huffington Post—which would be bad enough—but for it’s Chicago-specific publication that competes directly with the Chicago Reader. Simply and totally unacceptable. Ryan Tate at Gawker calls the practice “straight jacking,” and charges that once upon a time the Huffington Post hijacked Gawker‘s entire RSS feed.

Meanwhile, layoffs in the Chicago mediasphere are rampant. Real people writing real stories are losing real jobs while Huffington is selling ads around their purloined articles.

Moser did a quick investigation and discovered that Huffington Post was blatantly stealing a whole bunch of articles from other Chicago independent online publications.

Redbox, the US DVD rental company that has kiosks in McDonalds and other retail locations, has filed a lawsuit against Universal Studios. The lawsuit alleges that the movie studio is abusing US copyright law and engaging in anticompetitive behavior. Redbox claims that an agreement Universal attempted to force upon it would prohibit it from selling used DVDs, limit the number of DVDs distributed through the kiosks, wait 45 days after a DVD’s release to rent it, and best of all—wait for it—give Universal 40% of its gross revenues.

Redbox rents DVDs for US$1 per day and sells used DVDs for US$7 at more than 10,000 kiosks throughout the United States.

The sale of used DVDs, in case you were wondering, is protected by the first sale doctrine, section 109(a) of US copyright law. It specifically allows a copyrighted item to be resold or given away without permission or license from the copyright holder.

Corporate copyright holders have taken to issuing Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown orders with wild abandon. Such wild abandon, in fact, that they’ve begun to overstep legal bounds.

Take Universal. In May of last year, the media conglomerate went after conservative columnist Michelle Malkin for embedding clips from American Idol and several music videos in a video criticism published on YouTube. That this clearly met any reasonable fair-use test didn’t so much as slow down Universal and its DMCA takedown order. It was of apparently no consequence that the entire music videos were available on YouTube. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a counter-notice on Malkin’s behalf, informing the video service that the use was non-infringing, and the work was eventually restored.

Then, a month later, Universal issued a DMCA takedown order for a Stephanie Lenz video on YouTube of her infant dancing to background stereo music to which Universal holds copyright. A 30 second video clip. Lenz immediately responded to Universal’s takedown demand with a counter-notice, but YouTube never reinstated the original work. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed suit against Universal, claiming the music used in the clip was “self-evident non-infringing fair use.”

The DMCA provides protection against misuse in that lawsuits can be brought against false takedown notices. Viacom, for example, was forced to apologize for its takedown notice of a video clip satirizing Stephen Colbert after the EFF filed suit against the media giant.

After a series of what had to be embarrassing successful counter-notices, you’d think the corporate media conglomerates would quickly learn and back off. Apparently they were incapable of either.

In an update to the suit filed by the EFF on behalf of Lenz, this week Universal told Judge Jeremy Fogel that Lenz’s video clip was an infringement even though it may be fair use. Simply Orwellian—and I use the term advisedly—political manipulation of the language by obfuscation. “Are you saying there cannot be a misuse of a takedown notice if the material is copyrighted?” asked Judge Fogel. “I don’t think ‘fair use’ qualifies,” Kelly Klaus, the Universal lawyer, replied.

In case you’ve lost track, the fair use doctrine permits limited use of copyright-protected materials without permission.

In a 2-1 decision, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan overturned a contentious agreement between publishers and freelance writers which allows freelancers to be paid for electronic rights in their work. The basis for the ruling, according to Richard Perez-Pena’s account in the New York Times, is specious: two of the judges held that courts have no jurisdiction over the copyright dispute because most of freelance writers’ works were not registered with the US Copyright Office.

US copyright law requires registration for damages to be awarded in infringement cases, but specifically allows legal action against alleged infringement of unregistered works.

In a 2001 decision, the US Supreme Court held that digital reproduction of a freelance author’s work without permission copyright infringement. Publishers began demanding that freelance authors grant digital rights with no additional compensation, and the authors resisted. A settlement was reached in March 2005 which granted minimal payments to the freelancers (the publishers’ exposure was capped at US$18 million).

Two Democrat representatives—George Miller (California) and Ruben Hinojosa (Texas)—have introduced a bill to amend the Higher Education Act of 1965. The proposed legislation, called the College Opportunity and Affordability Act, would require universities to not just deter student file-sharing on campus, but institute alternatives to file-sharing, such as monthly subscription fees to the death-throes-convulsing US entertainment cartel. Universities that fail to provide such deterrents and alternatives could lose all financial aid for their students; even students that don’t own computers.

A consortium of universities—the chancellor of the University of Maryland, the presidents of Penn State and Stanford, and the general counsel of Yale—sent a letter to Congress stating that while the higher education community recognizes the seriousness of the problem and continues to be committed to reaching a workable solution, “such an extraordinarily inappropriate and punitive outcome would result in all students on that campus losing their federal financial aid—including Pell grants and student loans that are essential to their ability to attend college, advance their education, and acquire the skills necessary to compete in the 21st-century economy.”

Several universities have already begun filtering file transfers on their networks according to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

Miller and Hinojosa’s legislation appears to be a revival of Senator Harry Reid‘s (D-Nevada) attempt at authoring a similar law last summer. Reid’s proposal called for technical deterrents to file-sharing. That attempt failed, resulting in a requirement that schools advise students of the legal consequences of copyright infringement.