Copyleft: the magazine

Apparently sporting one of the busiest legal departments in the music biz, Universal was in the news again this week, this time suing video sharing site Veoh with “massive copyright violation” for hosting vids that might maybe have Universal’s copyrighted audio or video. This case, not unlike the now legendary Viacom v. YouTube, has the makings of another nasty showdown between content distributors (Viacom, Google and YouTube) and those who claim to represent content creators (Universal, Viacom and the RIAA/MPAA). As with the YouTube lawsuit, Veoh claims that they aren’t responsible for what people upload since they respond to all DCMA take-down requests. Ironically, it has been relatively widely reported that Universal has never sent any take-down notices to Veoh, but instead went straight for the jugular. The way this one goes down is going to probably depend greatly on the results of the YouTube case. We’ll keep you posted.

(via Wired and Ars Technica)

After one of the shorter debates we’ve seen in recent months over fair use, Viacom has settled with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, MoveOn.org, Stanford’s Fair Use Project and Brave New Films (did we miss anyone? no? good.) regarding one or more of their use of footage in a parody film. At the heart of the issue was a short spoof of Comedy Central’s Colbert Report called “Stop the Falsiness” posted on YouTube. The offending film sampled clips of the Report as a commentary on what MoveOn.org and Brave New Films saw as Colbert’s “shrill, partisan anti-bear” extremism. Viacom (the parent company of Comedy Central) originally denied filing the DCMA take-down notice with YouTube to remove the film, which came on the heals with a much larger complaint against Google and YouTube in which Viacom has asked the courts for $1 billion in damages for what it claims are 160,000 “unauthorized clips”.

Viacom, for its part, is playing down the settlement, saying that it is simply applying its rigorous standards for protecting its copyrighted material and this all wouldn’t have happened if someone had just asked them permission first, according to the Associated Press. While we at Copyleft take no official stance on Steven Colbert’s politics, the fact that Viacom has come clean on at least one of its take down attacks. One clip back up on YouTube, 159,999 to go.

(from EFF and AP)