Source: https://www.copyrightcontentplatforms.com/
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 20:35:51+00:00

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Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA, codified 47 U.S.C. § 230) and the Safe Harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA, codified 17 U.S.C. § 512) provide certain protections for operators of online services from some, but not all, third-party claims arising out of user content posted on those services. These protections are essential for the survival of services that host user content. However, there are many limitations to the scope of protection and conditions on what is required to be eligible for those protections. The law in this area continues to evolve, so we have summarized recent notable cases and legislation that publishers should consider in operating their user content programs.
Section 230 of the CDA protects providers of interactive computer services from liability from suits that may arise when other internet users post material to a provider’s platform, except for infringement of intellectual property rights (which in some circuits has been held to include publicity rights), or violation of federal criminal law or certain other narrow carve-outs. 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1).
In Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corp. v. Wall-Street.com, the Supreme Court settled the long unresolved question of whether registration or simply the application for registration is required to commence a suit for copyright infringement. In a unanimous decision authored by Justice Ginsburg, the high court ruled that a copyright owner cannot pursue infringement claims in court until the Copyright Office has registered the work at issue.
In December 2014, Cisco Systems, Inc. sued rival ethernet switch provider Arista Networks, Inc., for more than $300 million because it allegedly infringed Cisco’s copyrights in operating system software that manages Cisco switches. Curiously, Cisco did not claim that Arista infringed the copyright in the software’s source code, which many understand to be the subject of computer program copyright. Rather, Cisco claimed that Arista infringed portions of the user interface of the software –specifically by copying more than 500 multiword command expressions.
2017 was a big year for raising the profile of copyright in protecting computer programs. Two cases in particular helped bring attention to a myth that was addressed and dispelled some time ago but persists in some circles nonetheless. Many lawyers hold on to the notion that copyright protection for software is weak because such protection inheres in the source code of computer programs. Because most companies that generate code take extensive (and often successful) measures to keep source code out of the hands of third parties, the utility of copyright protection for code is often viewed as limited. However, copyright also extends to the “non-literal elements” of computer programs, such as their sequence, structure and organization, as well as to things such as screen displays and certain user interfaces. In other words, copyright infringement can occur when copying certain outputs of the code without there ever having been access to the underlying code itself.
Two jury verdicts, one in late 2016 and one in early 2017, helped emphasize just how valuable copyrights can be in the protection of software. On December 14, 2016, Cisco Systems Inc. lost a case to Arista Networks Inc. for alleged copying of the command line interfaces of Cisco software used to manage ethernet switches. Although Cisco did not prevail, the case, Cisco v. Arista, Case No. 5:14-cv-5344-BLF (N.D. Cal. NC), is noteworthy in that Cisco claimed more than $300 million in damages and proceeded to a jury verdict in a software copyright case that did not involve copying of code. The verdict is on appeal, with multiple amici filing supporting briefs. By contrast, on February 1, 2017, in the case of Zenimax v. Oculus, Case No. 3:16-mc-00098 (N.D. Tex.), virtual reality video game publisher ZeniMax Media Inc. obtained a $500 million verdict against Facebook subsidiary Oculus VR Inc., $50 million of which has been attributed to the copying of software architecture.
Spanski Enterprises, Inc. v. Telewizja Polska, S.A.: How Far Is Too Far When It Comes to the Extraterritorial Reach of US Copyright Law?
As a general matter, acts of copyright infringement that occur outside the jurisdiction of the United States are not actionable under U.S. copyright law. “The Copyright Act, it has been observed time and again, does not apply extraterritorially.” Kirstaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 133 S.Ct. 1351, 1376 (2013) (Ginsburg, J. dissenting). The general prohibition against the extraterritorial application of U.S. copyright law has been interpreted to mean that (1) purely extraterritorial conduct is not actionable in U.S. courts, but (2) extraterritorial conduct that crosses international borders and results in infringing conduct within the United States remains actionable under U.S. copyright laws. M. Nimmer & D. Nimmer, Copyright § 17.02 p. 17-28 (2015).
In Spanski Enterprises, Inc. v. Telewizja Polska, S.A., (Case No. 17-7051), the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia will have to determine whether U.S. copyright law extends to situations in which the entirety of the defendant’s conduct occurred outside the territorial limits of the U.S., and the only allegedly infringing conduct occurring in the U.S. resulted from activities undertaken by plaintiff’s own lawyers.
When the Supreme Court ruled in 1998 that copyright infringement lawsuits were subject to the Seventh Amendment’s right to jury trial, the natural consequence of that ruling was that fair use would likewise become a jury issue. However, at the time Congress enacted the Copyright Act’s fair use provision, 17 U.S.C. § 107, copyright infringement lawsuits were still considered “equitable actions” and thus the exclusive province of federal judges. Indeed, Congress expressly noted that its adoption of four factors set forth in Section 107 was intended in part to reflect the criteria that courts themselves had developed under the judicial doctrine of fair use. The final result of this Congressional action was a fair use statute that vested the trier of fact with broad discretion over the circumstances under which an author’s exclusive rights must give way to other societal interests. Now that such broad discretion has been given to juries, are there any circumstances in which trial judges may overturn the jury’s fair use determination because the court would have decided the issue differently?
On May 30, 2017, Judge William H. Pauley III, in the Southern District of New York, ruled that rapper-singer-songwriter Drake was permitted to use a sample of jazz artist Jimmy Smith based on the fair use doctrine, even though Drake and his record label did not license the publishing rights to the song. The court found that Drake’s use of the track was “transformative” because it changed Smith’s critique that jazz is the only “real” music into a suggestion that Drake’s hip-hop music was also real.

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