Australian Music Label Caught in Legal Battle in USA over Fair Use of Music
Thursday 3 October 2013 @ 9.09 a.m. | IP & Media | Trade & Commerce
The Age (2 October 2013) has recently reported that ". . . Melbourne-based music label [Liberation Music] has been caught up in a legal battle in the US after one of its automatically generated copyright warnings demanded a famous copyright lawyer remove his own lecture from YouTube".
Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig has launched a legal action after Liberation Music ordered that he take down a YouTube video of a lecture he had given in South Korea in 2010. The reason for requiring the "take down" was that the lecture contained portions of a song that Liberation owned the rights to in Australia and New Zealand.
The Professor's legal action in response to Liberation's removal of his lecture was to allege that the company's reaction was extreme because its issue of take down notices was automatic and based simply on when computers detect its songs and did not take fair usage and like exceptions into consideration.
The Age reports the professor as saying: "I have the opportunity . . . to challenge this particular attack. I am hopeful the precedent this case will set will help others avoid such a need to fight . . ."
The Age reports that while initially YouTube had shut down public access to the video on 30 June 2013, access had since been restored and Liberation Music had retracted the notice threatening Professor Lessig with legal action. The Age quotes Google's Australian spokespeople (Google owns YouTube) as saying: "We reinstate content when we receive a retraction from the party who originally submitted the notification . . .''
According to the Age no defence has apparently been filed by Liberation Music as yet. Professor Lessig's complaint filed in the US District Court in Massachusetts argues that Liberation Music "enforces its purported rights robotically" making no effort to examine whether the professors "alleged" breach fell within the "fair use" limits of copyright law, which the Professor argues it does.
Liberation has confirmed the song was detected through scanning software and that on 8 July 2013 it sent a notice to the Professor threatening legal action against him in the District of Massachusetts which including a potential fine of $160,000AD for copyright infringement.
The Age also quotes partner at King & Wood Mallesons in Australia, John Swinson, as saying that this case would help determine if copyright owners were now
"over-reaching or just enforcing their rights . . . Computer-generated notices are a very blunt instrument and now we have a copyright expert taking on the computer to see whether the blunt instrument needs to be refined to have actual human involvement in the process . . ."
It should be noted that the US has much broader "fair use" laws than is currently allowed in Australia but as the Age points out the Australian Law Reform Commission is considering the fair use exception and it is part of its current review of Australia's copyright and the digital economy laws.
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