In 2008, Universal Music fraudulently claimed that a short Youtube clip
of a toddler dancing to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” was a copyright
infringement, leading to eight years of litigation
and, eventually, a landmark ruling secured by the Electronic Frontier
Foundation in which the court found that Universal had a duty to
consider fair use before using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to
censor other peoples’ media.
Universal is a slow learner.
When Prince died, thousands of his fans gathered in his hometown of
Minneapolis to sing “Purple Rain”; Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter
Aaron Lavinsky recorded a video of that moving tribute and uploaded it
to Twitter, where it has racked up more than 500,000 views.
Years later – and after having lost the landmark “Dancing Baby” case so
very comprehensively – Stupid Universal has sent a Digital Millennium
Copyright Act complaint to Twitter, getting Lavinsky’s video censored.
After negative publicity, Universal apparently decided that it didn’t
want to waste another eight years finding out how totally wrong it was,
and withdrew the complaint.
Annabelle Narey hired a London construction firm called BuildTeam to do
some work, which she found very unsatisfactory (she blames them for a
potentially lethal roof collapse in a bedroom); so she did what many of
us do when we’re unhappy with a business: she wrote an online complaint,
and it was joined by other people who said that they had hired
BuildTeam and been unhappy with the work.
She posted her complaint to Mumsnet, the hugely popular, woman-centric
site. BuildTeam claimed that Narey’s message contained 11 different
libels, which she disputes. After a long wrangle (Narey says BuildTeam
sent staffers to her home to wave printouts of the complaint at her and
request that she remove it), Mumsnet and Narey declined to take the
complaint down.
But it’s disappeared anyway: in April (three years after Narey’s post), a
mysterious content-farm posted a copy of Narey’s post, then filed a
complaint with Google saying that Narey’s post infringed its copyright.
Google delisted the entire thread, making it invisible to potential
BuildTeam customers.
The duplicate post on the content-farm was signed by “Douglas Bush” of
South Bend, Indiana, but the site is registered to Muhammed Ashraf of
Faisalabad, Pakistan.
Mumsnet, anxious not to lose their Google rank, deleted Narey’s post.
BuildTeam says that they are just as mystified as anyone about this
mysterious American-Pakistani website that had such a tactically useful
complaint about its services to Londoners, which just happened to solve a
reputation problem that BuildTeam had struggled with for three years.
This kind of copyfraud is about to get a lot worse: The EU is poised to mandate copyright filters for all online media. Under this scheme, the Muhammed Ashrafs of the world could ensure that certain blocks of text never showed up on any website or service, by pre-emptively registering the copyright in them.
Which is bad enough when it’s copyfraud being committed by sleazy offshore reputation-launderers, but the political uses are much
scarier: how many times has an election turned on a critical piece of
media being released to the public a few days before the polls, and
going viral? Under the EU’s Article 13 proposal, politicians could avoid
this fatal embarrassment by wielding the EU’s omnipotent cyberweapon to pre-emptively censor any potential disclosure.
MEPs will go to a key vote on Article 13 on July 5. Save Your Internet
has everything you need to contact them and tell them to protect our
public discourse from criminals, fraudsters, political opportunists and
trolls.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 