Source: http://blog.internetcases.com/category/dmca/
Timestamp: 2019-04-18 17:21:14+00:00

Document:
EGS and DDS were in a dispute over the use of DDS’s software. [You can read about the copyright infringement claims here.] DDS claimed EGS had failed to pay license fees for its software. So DDS installed an update that would confirm the current license, and if the license was not up to date, would lock the program. In response, EGS elected to use a previously-licensed and older version of the software that did not contain the license check feature. Because of this, DDS claimed that EGS violated the anticircumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
EGS moved to dismiss the DMCA anticircumvention claim. The court denied the motion.
EGS had argued in part that it did not violate the anticircumvention provisions because its conduct was like the defendant in the case of I.M.S. Inquiry Management Systems, Ltd. v. Berkshire Info. Systems, Inc., 307 F. Supp. 2d 521 (S.D.N.Y. 2004). In that case, the defendant used a legitimate username and password to gain access to the protected work.
The court acknowledged that like the situation in I.M.S., EGS did not do anything to change or manipulate the DDS software. However, as the court noted, the fact remained that EGS allegedly removed the software and reinstalled a prior version. For that reason, I.M.S. and the similar case of Navistar, Inc. v. New Baltimore Garage, Inc., 2012 WL 4338816 (N.D. Ill. Sept. 20, 2012), were not to the contrary.
First, those cases acknowledged that removing a technological measure suffices to state a claim under the DMCA. Second, EGS had leaned heavily on the fact that DDS analogized its license check to a password protection system, and that the district courts in I.M.S. and Navistar reasoned that “using a password to access a copyrighted work, even without authorization, does not constitute circumvention under the DMCA …” But implicit in those courts’ reasoning was a recognition that the licensee already knew the password and thus had the key to the castle.
In this case, to the contrary, EGS had no way to go through the license check and access the current software except by removing it entirely. Accordingly, the court found that a more apt analogy was that EGS circumvented “the deployed technological measure in the measure’s gatekeeping capacity” by uprooting the locked gate.
This entry was posted in Copyright, DMCA and tagged anticircumvention, DMCA on February 11, 2019 by Evan Brown (@internetcases).
Plaintiff sued defendant claiming defendant violated the DMCA by providing and distributing false copyright management information (“CMI”), in violation of 17 U.S.C. § 1202(a)(1)–(2). Defendant had placed its brand name and logo on and adjacent to plaintiff’s photo within defendant’s advertising material.
Section 1202(c) defines CMI as “any of the following information conveyed in connection with copies or phonorecords of a work or performances or displays of a work, including in digital form, except that such term does not include any personally identifying information about a user of a work or of a copy, phonorecord, performance, or display of a work: …” (emphasis added). It goes on to list eight types of CMI, as relevant in this case: (2) the name of, and other identifying information about, the author of the work; (3) the name of, and other identifying information about, the copyright owner of the work, including the information set forth in a notice of copyright; and (7) identifying numbers or symbols referring to such information or links to such information.
Defendant moved to dismiss, arguing that the plain language of § 1202(c) excepts from the definition of CMI “any personally identifying information about a user of a work or of a copy, phonorecord, performance, or display of a work.” It reasoned that because plaintiff’s complaint defined defendant as a “user” of the photograph (i.e., by alleging that defendant used the photograph for commercial promotion) and because personally identifiable information includes names, the name of a user of a work is not, and cannot, be CMI.
The court rejected this argument and denied the motion to dismiss. It looked to the decision of another federal court, Tiermy v. Moschino S.P.A., No. 15-CV-5900, 2016 WL 4942033 (C.D. Cal. Jan. 13, 2016) in which a defendant had made a similar argument. As that court noted, defendant’s argument fell short on a logical basis. Taking defendant’s theory to the extreme, virtually any person who took another’s work and placed their name or brand on it could be considered a “user of a work” rather than an infringer, and escape liability. The court found that was not the intent of the statute, which is to protect the integrity of CMI by prohibiting the provision of false CMI. The court held that it cannot be, and defendant provided no authority in support, that an alleged infringer can escape liability under § 1202(a) simply because the false CMI put forth is the alleged infringer’s own name.
This entry was posted in Copyright, DMCA and tagged CMI, Copyright, DMCA on January 25, 2019 by Evan Brown (@internetcases).
Plaintiff sued defendants under the provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) (17 U.S.C. § 1202(a)) that, among other things, prohibits a person from knowingly and with the intent to induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal infringement, provide copyright management information that is false.
Defendants moved to dismiss for failure to state a claim. The district court granted the motion, and plaintiff sought review with the Second Circuit. On appeal, the court affirmed the dismissal.
It noted that in order to plead a violation of Section 1202(a), a plaintiff must plausibly allege that a defendant knowingly provided false copyright information and that the defendant did so with the intent to induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal an infringement. This is a double scienter requirement.
In this case, the court found that plaintiff’s DMCA claim merely alleged that one of the defendants was identified on a disputed work (a book) as its author, and that she was listed in the notice of copyright as its owner, which plaintiff alleges is false.
The court held that these facts did not amount to a plausible allegation that defendants knew that such copyright information was false, or that it even was false. Moreover, plaintiff had failed to adequately plead that defendants intended to conceal valid copyright management information.
This entry was posted in Copyright, DMCA and tagged Copyright, copyright management information, digital millennium copyright act, DMCA on September 3, 2018 by Evan Brown (@internetcases).
Is a DMCA subpoena to identify unknown infringers valid if the infringement has ended?
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) is well-known for its notice and takedown provisions. But the DMCA provides a number of other interesting mechanisms, including a procedure for potential copyright plaintiffs to send subpoenas to online service providers to learn the identity of users who posted infringing content to that service. A recent case involving some subpoenas that a copyright owner sent to eBay examines the relationship between the notice and takedown procedures on one hand, and the subpoena mechanism on the other. The question before the court was whether a DMCA subpoena is valid if, by the time it is served on the online service provider, that online service provider has already removed or has disabled access to that content.
Section 512(h) (17 U.S.C. 512(h)) spells out the DMCA subpoena process, and how it relates to the notice and takedown provisions. An online service provider must act expeditiously to identify the user who uploaded infringing content “[u]pon receipt of the issued subpoena, either accompanying or subsequent to the receipt of a [takedown request].” That plain language seems straightforward — an online service provider has to provide the identifying information in response to any subpoena it receives either with or subsequent to a takedown notice.
In the recent case of In re DMCA Subpoena to eBay, Inc., eBay, as the recipient of subpoenas to identify some of its users, picked up on the Maximized Living holding to argue that it did not have to answer the subpoenas because it had already taken down the offending content pursuant to previous takedown notices. Since the subpoenas did not relate to “currently infringing activity,” eBay argued à la Maximized Living, that the subpoenas had not been issued under §512(h)’s power and were therefore invalid.
The court rejected eBay’s argument. The key distinction in this case was that, unlike in Maximized Living, the takedown notices in this case, when they issued, related to content that was on the eBay servers at the time the takedown notices were issued. Granted, some of those takedown notices went all the way back to early 2012 (query whether the subpoena should be valid if it would only uncover the identity of an infringer for whom the 3-year copyright statute of limitations had passed; but that wasn’t before the court).
So to simply state the rule in this case — for a DMCA subpoena to be valid, it has to relate to a valid DMCA takedown notice. That DMCA takedown notice is not valid unless it was served at a time when infringing content resided on the service. An online service provider cannot avoid the obligation of responding to a subpoena by taking down the content, thereby causing there to be no “currently infringing activity”. Such a rule would, as the court observed, cause the online service provider’s safe harbor protection to also shield the alleged infringer from being identified. That would indeed be an odd application of the DMCA’s protection. The court in this case avoided that outcome.
In re DMCA Subpoena to eBay, Inc., 2015 WL 3555270 (S.D. Cal. June 5, 2015).
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Thomas Galvez under this Creative Commons license.
This entry was posted in Copyright, DMCA and tagged Copyright, DMCA, eBay, infringement on June 10, 2015 by Evan Brown (@internetcases).
GitHub has baked in some feelgood to its new DMCA takedown policy. The new setup features clearer language, a refusal to automatically disable all forks of an allegedly infringing repository, and a 24-hour window in which the target of a takedown notice may make changes. The mechanisms of this third point ought to cause one to consider whether GitHub is risking the protections of the DMCA safe harbor.
If a DMCA takedown notice alleges that only certain files (as opposed to the whole repository) infringe, under the new policy, GitHub “will contact the user who created the repository and give them approximately 24 hours to delete or modify the content specified in the notice.” If the user makes changes to the repository, the burden shifts back to the sender of the DMCA notice. This shifing-the-burden-back seems problematic under the DMCA.
If the user makes changes, the copyright owner must review them and renew or revise their takedown notice if the changes are insufficient. GitHub will not take any further action unless the copyright owner contacts us to either renew the original takedown notice or submit a revised one. If the copyright owner is satisfied with the changes, they may either submit a formal retraction or else do nothing. GitHub will interpret silence longer than two weeks as an implied retraction of the takedown notice.
The DMCA protects a party in GitHub’s position so long as the party “responds expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing upon notification of claimed infringement”. Read that provision carefully — the response must be to take down, not merely take steps to work with the alleged infringer to make it right. GitHub’s new mechanism of interpreting silence as a retraction is not an expeditious removal of or disabling access to allegedly infringing material. Nothing in the DMCA requires the sender of the takedown notice to have to ask twice.
You’ve got to hand it to GitHub for trying to make the world a better place through this new policy. The intended net effect is to reduce the number of instances in which entire repositories are taken down simply because of a few allegedly infringing files. But GitHub is putting something of great value, namely, its DMCA safe harbor protection, at risk.
Many copyright plaintiffs look for every possible angle to pin liability. You can almost be certain that a copyright owner will challenge GitHub’s safe harbor status on the ground that GitHub did not respond expeditiously. It seems odd GitHub would be willing to toss a perfectly good affirmative defense. One would think the better approach would be to go ahead and take the repository down after 24 hours, rather than leaving it up and risk a finding on “non-expeditiousness”.
This entry was posted in Copyright, DMCA and tagged Copyright, DMCA, GitHub on October 16, 2014 by Evan Brown (@internetcases).
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provides safe harbors from copyright infringement liability for online service providers (17 U.S.C. 512) and makes it unlawful to circumvent technological measures that effectively control access to copyrighted works (17 U.S.C. 1201). A lesser-known (and lesser-litigated) provision of the DMCA (17 U.S.C. 1202) makes it illegal to intentionally remove or alter any copyright management information or to distribute copies of works knowing that copyright information has been removed or altered without authority of the copyright owner or the law. “Copyright management information” includes information conveyed in connection with copies of the work, such as the title and the name of the author.
A recent case from federal court in Florida considered whether this regulation of copyright management information in the DMCA applies only to electronic works intended for distribution over the internet, or whether it applies to more traditional works such as hard copy technical drawings. The court interpreted the DMCA broadly to apply to all kinds of works, whether on the internet or not.
In this case, however, the court noted that other courts, focusing on the plain language of the DMCA, have held differently, and approved the DMCA’s application to non-technological contexts. See Murphy v. Millennium Radio Group LLC, 650 F.3d 295 (3d Cir.2011); Agence France Presse v. Morel, 769 F.Supp.2d 295 (S.D.N.Y.2011). Although in this case, as in Murphy, the legislative history of the DMCA was consistent with defendant’s interpretation, it did not actually contradict it. Instead, Section 1202(b) simply established a cause of action for the removal of, among other things, the name of the author of a work when it has been conveyed in connection with copies of the work.
So the court, as it found it was required to do, considered the statute’s plain meaning before it considered its legislative history. Under that analysis, it held that plaintiff’s allegations were sufficient to a state a claim for violation of the DMCA.
This entry was posted in Copyright, DMCA and tagged CMI, Copyright, DMCA on July 15, 2014 by Evan Brown (@internetcases).
Must a service provider remove all content a repeat infringer uploaded to qualify for the DMCA safe harbor?
Does an online service provider forfeit the safe harbor protections of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act if, when terminating the account of a repeat infringer, it does not delete all content the repeat infringer uploaded — infringing and noninfringing alike? A recent decision involving the antique internet technology Usenet sheds light on an answer.
Active copyright plaintiff Perfect 10 sued Usenet provider Giganews for direct and secondary liability for hosting allegedly infringing materials on the Giganews servers. Giganews asserted the safe harbor of the DMCA (17 U.S.C. 512) as an affirmative defense. Perfect 10 moved for summary judgment on whether the safe harbor applied – it argued that the safe harbor did not apply, Giganews argued that it did. The court denied Perfect 10’s motion.
Perfect 10 asserted that Giganews had not reasonably implemented a policy to terminate the accounts of repeat infringers as required by 17 U.S.C. 512 (i)(1)(A). One of the arguments Perfect 10 made was that Giganews did not reasonably implement its repeat infringer policy because Giganews terminated the accounts of the infringers but did not also delete all the content the infringers had uploaded.
The court was not persuaded that § 512(i)(1)(A) requires a service provider to disable or delete all content a repeat infringer has ever posted. The plain language of the statute requires “termination … of subscribers and account holders,” not the deletion of content. And because a requirement of taking down all content, not just infringing content, would serve no infringement-preventing purpose, the court held that there was no justification for reading such a requirement into the statute.
This entry was posted in Copyright, DMCA and tagged Copyright, DMCA, infringement, safe harbor on February 7, 2014 by Evan Brown (@internetcases).
Author and her publisher disagreed on the content of two of the author’s new books. (As an aside, this author is very prolific — she alleges that she publishes a new book every two weeks!) So rather than deal with publisher, author self-published the works on Amazon. Publisher sent DMCA takedown notices to Amazon, with which Amazon complied. Author sued publisher under Section 512(f) of the DMCA, which provides penalties against senders of DMCA takedown notices that knowingly materially misrepresent claims of infringement. She sought a temporary restraining order (TRO), asking the court to instruct publisher to tell Amazon to make the works available.
The court denied the TRO motion. It found that author had failed to show she would suffer irreparable harm if the works were not put back on the market. In the court’s view, author failed to show how a temporary delay in sales would affect her reputation or goodwill.
The case presents an interesting issue concerning a party’s right to send a DMCA takedown notice. Author alleges that her agreement with publisher provided she owns the copyright in her works, and that publisher merely has a right of first refusal to publish any “sequels” to her previous works. So if what author is saying is true, that publisher does not have a copyright interest in the books but merely a contract interest, she stands a good chance, ultimately, on her 512(f) claim.
This entry was posted in Copyright, DMCA, Litigation and tagged 512(f), Copyright, DMCA, infringement on September 25, 2013 by Evan Brown (@internetcases).

References: v. 
 v. 
 § 1202
 § 1202
 v. 
 § 1202
 § 1202
 §512
 v. 
 v. 
 § 512