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September Newsletter: Success stories, challenging AT&T, and Blogworld 2011

Submitted by New Media Rights on Thu, 09/08/2011 - 09:40

Our September newsletter brings news of success stories fighting DMCAi abuse, a grant awarded by the California Consumer Protection Foundation, and our continuing efforts to stop the AT&T-Tmobile merger. 

You can also catch us in person at Media Law in the Digital Age in October, a conference coproduced by Harvard Berkman Center's Digital Media Law Project and the Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State University, as well as Blogworld 2011 in LA in November.

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Veoh triumphs over Universal Music in lawsuit on social media liability, gives lesson in the DMCA safe harbor

art neill's picture
Submitted by art neill on Tue, 09/15/2009 - 09:31

"Jump on the Social Media Bandwagon" by Matt Hamm, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 2.0. It is uncertain whether Veoh will be a major player in the future of online video. There is little doubt, however, that it has had a significant role in defining the boundaries of social media liability.

Veoh's victories against IoGroup and Universal Music have helped provide a model for social media and web 2.0 services in protecting themselves from liability.

Veoh's newest triumph is getting the district court to grant summary judgement that it is "entitled to the section 512(c) safe harbor."

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The AP is going stop bloggers from pirating content (or quoting in fair use for legitimate reasons)

art neill's picture
Submitted by art neill on Tue, 06/02/2009 - 14:00

The AP says it is taking aim at "wholesale theft" with new technology that is aimed at targeting reposting of "entire articles." The new technology is supposed to simply flag questionable articles for lawyers and paralegals to then review.

The question is will the new technology be so limited, or will the AP use the technology to follow the same path it took filing DMCA takedown notices falsely characterizing the law regarding the Drudge retort's postings as follows:

"...the use is not fair use simply because the work copied happened to be
a news article and that the use is of the headline and the first few
sentences only ."

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Why Juicycampus.com, Rottenneighbor.com, and gossip sites could be a good thing for free speech

art neill's picture
Submitted by art neill on Wed, 04/23/2008 - 23:12

Recently I got a call from a reporter at the local ABC affiliate in San Diego to interview for a story about juicycampus.com. The questions hinted that the story the reporter was looking for was one of how awful and hurtful some of the anonymous posts on the site are for students. I spent 30 minutes telling the reporter what I thought, particularly how similar, at least from a free speech perspective, gossip sites like juicycampus.com are to more widely accepted sites, such as wikipedia, craigslist, and wikilinks, which also allow anonymous posting, editing, or comments.

The resulting story was a disappointment, noticeably lacking any mention of free speech. While this was not unexpected, I figured I'd share my thoughts, and a bit of dismay for the old media, here in the new media world.

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Wikileaks.org shutdown by California court; how a webhost can hijack your url

art neill's picture
Submitted by art neill on Fri, 02/22/2008 - 18:05


Wikileaks.org, a site dedicated to providing an open forum for whistleblowers to expose corporate and government misdeeds, has been shut down in its entirety by a U.S. federal district court in San Francisco. This is really a "New Media Wrong."

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