Vimeo Sued For Audio Infringement 85
USS_Natas writes "Capitol Records and other labels have sued Vimeo in federal court, charging that the site's emphasis on 'original works' only extends to videos, and that songs are widely used on Vimeo without a license. The plaintiffs hope to prove that Vimeo staffers know about the infringement, since they've been doing it themselves." NewTeeVee has a PDF of the court filing in a Scribd frame.
They have a valid complaint. (Score:1, Interesting)
Just this once, the record companies have a valid complaint.
The RIAA and MPAA are in REAL trouble (Score:4, Interesting)
because if they can't make this stick, they're going to disappear.
Vimeo is in a perfect position to request that they DO DO.
Copyright infringement is one of those things that can actually rear up and byte the **AAs in the butt.
By claiming first amendment rights on the ENTIRE file, audio and video and written text of the actual content of the file, they can force the issue that the AA's are, in fact, stepping on each others territory and refuse to comply with their requests until the establishment of a proper rights infringement body.
By setting the MPAA lawyers on the RIAA lawyers, Vimeo can ask that the issue of content creation be settled once and for all in a comprehensive manner.
Since the RIAA and the MPAA are not entitled to settle the matter by themselves, they end up effectively negating each others arguments.
Now of course the difficulty of settling all of this means that the litigation will pend for years, and may very well see the establishment of an ÜberAA to oversee the FAIR distribution of royalties, but at least it i the end of the various AAs.
Re:All these suits and money changing hands (Score:4, Interesting)
As long as you don't try to own Steve Jobs' farting - his are inaudible.
You mean he's violating the copyright of John Cage? [wikipedia.org]
Re:The RIAA and MPAA are in REAL trouble (Score:1, Interesting)
The other large issue here is does Capitol Records really want to take on Vimeo of all places in a case like this? It's a bit of a misrepresentation saying Vimeo
"draws most (if not all) of its appeal from, the use of copyrighted works.”
Much of the material on Vimeo is copy-writable, but as to whether the material was actually submitted for copyright is a different matter. There are many videos on Vimeo that contain material that is entirely the property of the original owner, where the same author created both the audio AND video portions themselves (eg: visual portion was recorded using footage from a hi-def handi-cam, iMovie and photoshop, and the audio was composed using GarageBand [apple.com] or something similar). There is an additional large amount of videos that contain only content that was licensed under the Creative Commons. It's not copyright infringement when the uploader is the author and owner of the copyright. Capital Records seems to be in denial that un-copyrighted material would generate any interest, but this is vimeos main draw, the site supports itself using mostly user created works to generate interest with a subscription model (free for light use, but with an option to pay for a greater transfer limit) with some additional revenue from T-shirt sales to cover the costs, it doesn't need anything from Capital Records to survive. Now their is a large amount of copyrighted content hosted on vimeo where the music was copyrighted, but let's say instead of trying to negotiate a deal with Capitol Records, vimeo instead complies with the suit by removing all copyrighted content from the site that Capitol Records owns the rights to. If vimeo is able to comply via removal, Capitol Records has essentially created a large content distribution site that purposefully goes out of its way to make sure that no one sees or hears anything they own the rights to. All the copyrighted material they had the rights to would b replaced with content licensed under the Creative Commons (or something similar), and Capital Records will have effectively destroyed it's own marketing model. Seems kind of counterintuitive to me, but this is Capital Records we'e talking about...
Re:Seriously true... (Score:5, Interesting)
So you think they'd still be sued if everybody used freely-licensed music
Yes, because ASCAP will be able to dig up something non-free that was written in the past 95 years and happens to sound like the freely-licensed music, making the free license invalid. We could end up with another Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music [ucla.edu] on our hands.