Australian Federal Court Awards Damages To Artist For False Copyright Claim 77
New submitter BarryHaworth writes "In a decision handed down earlier this month, the Australian Federal Court awarded damages to Aboriginal artist Richard Bell over a false claim of copyright infringement. The claim related to a take-down notice claiming copyright infringement from film footage used in a trailer for a film being made by the artist. The court declared Mr. Bell the owner of the copyright and awarded him $147,000 in damages for lost sales of paintings and catalogues. At time of writing, YouTube does not appear to have caught up with the decision."
I wish this would happen in the USA (Score:5, Insightful)
... just one big case would be enough to bring some sanity to our system.
Re:I wish this would happen in the USA (Score:5, Interesting)
Who the heck is Tanya Steele, and how could she be so dumb as to claim that she owns the copyright over a film maker's video???
ALSO: Didn't Megaupload win a False claim of copyright infrigement against a music company back in December? That would be a major win in our favor.
(Unfortunately the music company then called their friends in the Obamahouse, and they executed a worldwide raid in January, and shutdown the foreign site. Winning a court case is bad form in the U.S. of Corporation.)
Re:I wish this would happen in the USA (Score:4, Informative)
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Here's a link to the article on TorrentFreak [torrentfreak.com].
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Who the heck is Tanya Steele, and how could she be so dumb as to claim that she owns the copyright over a film maker's video???
The director of the film in question. Quite possibly she was someone who felt she was owed a share in the film or silly enough to attempt to claim copyright for work done on contract (or perhaps withough a contract, which is very silly indeed) in the USA. Or never rule out the prospect of someone thinking they could get away with it (the approach of most big media companies.)
Sucks to be her.
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TFA only states she was hired, says he was producer and director not her.
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Re:I wish this would happen in the USA (Score:4, Interesting)
She helped make the film and was paid for this. That does not mean she owned the copyright however. Probably she just had some dispute with the artist and tried to block things to aid negotiations.
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... just one big case would be enough to bring some sanity to our system.
And that's why, my friend, it won't happen in the USA.
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And that's why, my friend, it won't happen in the USA.
Well the artist is suing her there too, as Americans just ignore judgements made in other countries. He's got the money and he's pissed off enough to see it through.
This Can't Be! (Score:5, Funny)
But if you're not a corporation, you lack (Score:5, Informative)
everyone can copyright, you dont have to be a company
What you say is true in theory. But in practice, defending a work's copyright from the incumbent multinational publishers requires substantial financial resources. If you're not a corporation, you likely lack the resources to defend your copyright from false accusations of infringement. Nor do you have the resources to check the work that you are preparing to publish against every existing copyrighted work to make sure that there is no substantial similarity.
Re:But if you're not a corporation, you lack (Score:4, Interesting)
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en that the standard of infringement is three consecutive notes, ...
That is not the 'standard of infringement'. Don't spread misinformation AC. It really doesn't help.
Right; the actual standard seems to be one note. ;-)
The textbook example of this is the infamous copyright on "Happy Birthday". It seems that the defense in some court cases has attempted to argue that the tune is simply the rather older song "Good Morning to All", with different words. The prosecution's counter-argument is that they changed not just the lyrics, but the tune. In particular, they used two pickup notes for "Happy" rather than the single original pickup note for "Good", and this suffices
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In theory, a big corporation could drag it out for as long as they wanted, depending only on the amount of money in their bank account. In practice, if you can take the labels as far as the court stage, they'll probably drop it if as soon as it looks hopele
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Avoiding the next My Sweet Lord (Score:2)
There's simply no real financial sense to wasting their money trying to extract a few thousand dollars at the expense of much of their own time and money.
Then explain record labels suing individual file sharers, and explain George Harrison losing a million dollar lawsuit.
The onus is not on the accused to cross-check their work against every other work in existence.
Then what should one do to avoid losing a case like Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music or Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton? Accidental infringement cases like these serve to bolster this "fairly hefty misconception about copyright law".
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Sure. If it's not a clearly lost cause, then they'll give it a try. Most people just settle anyway.
Ah yes, indeed you're correct. I thought you were cla
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It has now.... (Score:2)
At time of writing, YouTube does not appear to have caught up with the decision
It has now... Damn You Tanya Stele!
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No, that video is still down.
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I don't understand what this "youtube has not caught up" phrase means? Did they pull they pull the artists video & refuse to put it back? Well it IS google after all. They do evil.
No wait. I think I got that motto wrong?
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Yes, you did. The motto never talks about doing evil or not.
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[Google's] motto never talks about doing evil or not.
Right; they're just doing evil; they're not being evil.
I'm sure there's a real distinction hidden in there somewhere ...
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In common terms, a person isn't necessarily evil even if they did in their lives evil things. How many people do you know that have never did anything evil in their life? Are all the others evil people?
(This is not even going into whether what they did is actually evil; since I don't believe in objective moral standards, I don't think that can be determined).
Note: I'm not saying Google is perfect, and I'm actually moving away from some of their services (and refuse to join G+) because I strongly dislike som
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It means the video is still unavailable on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLTZgqSAjQs [youtube.com] You'll get the following kind message:
"Blackfella's Guide to ..."
This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Tanya Steele.
Sorry about that."
Seems to me that the Youtube pulling is a more recent development as it appeared to be available as of the writing of TFA: "The trailer for the video is now on YouTube. Click here to watch the trailer." The original complaint had to do with the video being pu
The defendant didn't show up (Score:5, Informative)
And didn't bother having counsel show up.
And lives on the other side of the world to the court's jurisdiction.
Hooray for a meaningless judgement.
Re:The defendant didn't show up (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it meaningless? It sets precedence. The next case in that jurisdiction is more likely to go the same way; that seems meaningful to me.
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+1 Insightful
Precedent is very meaningful even though this guy will likely never see the money.
Re:The defendant didn't show up (Score:5, Interesting)
Is it meaningless? It sets precedence.
Not from a legal perspective it doesn't. It's just a claim for damages, with nobody disputing the claim. No consideration at all is given to the law because it is not actually tested.
Re:The defendant didn't show up (Score:5, Informative)
Copyright holders must consider fair use before issuing takedown notices for content posted on the internet.
Re:The defendant didn't show up (Score:5, Informative)
1. Not showing up is often an indication that they have no leg to stand on.
2. The Australian government has lots of ways to collect, the simplest being that if the defendant does any business in Australia the government can simply seize assets up to the amount of the judgment. If that isn't an option, they probably have agreements with other countries to collect judgments.
So it's not meaningless - they lost their case, and have to pay.
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Not showing up is also often an indication you don't care about that court.
I predict not a cent of the judgement will ever be collected. Of course I could be wrong, but the US doesn't usually give a toss what some lowly foreign court says.
Re:The defendant didn't show up (Score:5, Interesting)
The courts in the U.S. enforce foreign judgments* on a regular basis. The big question here will be whether the Australian court had personal jurisdiction over the defendant, or whether there's some other defect to the fairness of the judgment. For example, if the defendant could show that she had no notice to defend the suit in Australia, then she could raise that as a defense in the U.S. court. See the Uniform Foreign Money Judgments Recognition Act [upenn.edu], a version of which has been passed in many states, for more information.
*In the U.S., "foreign judgment" can refer to either a judgment rendered in a foreign country or a a judgment rendered in another U.S. state.
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In this case they do, specifically because the case reflected her actions in Australia and not in the US. Once she acted in Australia she subjected herself to Australian laws part of which is any statement of fact must be true and the defendant in a accusation of defamation must prove their statements true or lose the case.
Basically she was trying to hide behind American legal exceptionalism but got carried away with herself when she tried to take it out of the US.
Re:The defendant didn't show up (Score:5, Insightful)
And didn't bother having counsel show up.
And lives on the other side of the world to the court's jurisdiction.
Hooray for a meaningless judgement.
Yep .. the respondent didn't show up and also ignored the judges order to basically explain why she held copyright. So it seems that she cried wolf and couldn't back her claims up.
While Bell may find it a bit hard to collect from Tanya Steele, I'd say that she has now lost out on a lot of future work - who'd want to employ someone on a "work for hire" basis if after the fact they are going to dick with you over who owns copyright?
So in a sense it is a meaningless judgement, but I think it will have real world repercussions.
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And didn't bother having counsel show up.
And lives on the other side of the world to the court's jurisdiction.
Hooray for a meaningless judgement.
Yet they still want to claim copyright infringement there?
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Of course. Eat cake and have it to, you know?
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If the cake is digital, of course you can have your cake and eat it too!
Re:The defendant didn't show up (Score:5, Funny)
May be the FBI can extradite her to the Australia.
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It might be one thing if it were a country where she might conceivably never be inconvenienced by the decision. However, given that she's in the film industry, having a judgment against her in a major 1st-world country which shares much culture, language, and (most importantly) professional players in the media industry could be seriously inconvenient down the road.
Obviously she's already done business there once. This could, if not dealt with, forever close many doors of opportunity to her.
Background Findings from FCA 62 (Score:4, Informative)
While the award was made in FCA246, it is based on background findings in Bell v Steele (No 2) [2012] FCA 62 (7 February 2012) [austlii.edu.au] which gives a bit more detail on what happened leading up to the award judgement.
False contradiction (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:So let me get this straight... (Score:4, Insightful)
I believe that the majority of the people you seem to be raging against in your post don't like the record labels for quite a few reasons. The biggest being is that the contracts are largely on the record label's side, and any damages they'd win in any copyright infringement case wouldn't go to the creator, but to the copyright holder.
I could be going out on a limb here, but I suspect they like rewarding people for their creations, not for their ability to sue anyone and everyone because they can. I'm fairly certain we all have discussed this topic to the point where I don't need to cite relevant articles for this... i.e. suing dead people, grandmother's who don't know how to use a computer, etc...
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Your argument is nothing more than a equivocation [wikipedia.org] of the word misappropriation, trying to draw parallels between two very different cases:
A - Someone claimed a copyright monopoly over someone else's work, cutting off the original creator from all his rights and prohibiting him from licencing and distributing the work he created;
B - Someone enjoyed a copyrighted work without a licence from the creator, case in which the creator still has all his rights and can still distribute his work as he pleases;
There is
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Currently,the United States views copyright infringement as a form of theft [nytimes.com], but as Stuart Green points out
From its earliest days, the crime of theft has been understood to involve the misappropriation of things real and tangible. For Caveman Bob to “steal” from Caveman Joe meant that Bob had taken something of value from Joe — say, his favorite club — and that Joe, crucially, no longer had it. Everyone recognized, at least intuitively, that theft constituted what can loosely be defined as a zero-sum game: what Bob gained, Joe lost.
Copyright infringement can be understood as a "theft" of a monopoly-- the monopoly is destroyed,but that's stretching things a bit.
But here, the artists are prevented from exercising their rights to publish. Not only are they prevented from enjoying the fruits of a monopoly, they cannot even exploit their own property under less monopolistic conditions. The thief now has something of value, which the o
Re:So let me get this straight... (Score:4, Informative)
(1) You shouldn't have been modded troll. We can disagree with one another w/o the name calling.
(2) Most record labels are seeking their OWN wealth, not to compensate the artist. I think this was more than proved when record labels stole over 1 billion dollars worth of songs from Canadian artists (for use on greatest hits compilation CDs) and never paid those artists for use of their material.
Record labels are in it to enrich themselves, and screw the singer or writer or musician. As is true with most corporations & their employees.
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Never report that dude, you're essentially admitting it entered your RAM, and if it ended up on your cache, you're now in posession. DO NOT EVER REPORT THAT CRIME.
Just some free legal advice.
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I can't imagine what circumstances would lead that to be a common occurrence for you.
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anyone can block anything without checks (Score:2)
is the new way. it's about time some sensibility is being pressed on the system.
fyi though, the cases should also penalize the sites which do the take downs based on no merit. of course they don't take down stuff from emi&etc if some random guy claims copyright on them, on pictures used in them or in samples used in the music. that's just how sites like youtube roll right now. the takedown requests should always be accompanied with proof of ownership, if they can't provide that then it shouldn't be copy
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False.
According to the DMCA if someone takes-down your video, all you have to do is tell youtube, vimeo, etc that you DO in fact own the video and it should not have been taken down. The video then HAS to be restored per the Congressional Act (otherwise you could sue youtube, vimeo, etc).
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False.
According to the DMCA if someone takes-down your video, all you have to do is tell youtube, vimeo, etc that you DO in fact own the video and it should not have been taken down. The video then HAS to be restored per the Congressional Act (otherwise you could sue youtube, vimeo, etc).
Unless its Time Warner or Universal filing DMCA, then you are boned.
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What this really points to is the importance of net neutrality and the lack of bandwidth caps to ensure everybody can self publish, that no one can abuse the system by establishing anti-competitive publishing cartel contracts that lock the majority of people out of self publishing commercially viable content.
More still needs to be done to protect individual rights over publishing cartel greed and corruption of due process.
Judge says.... (Score:1)
You can watch it here: (Score:2)
Trailer was taken off Youtube (Score:2)
Looks like Tanya Steele is still at it, now on Youtube...
"Blackfella's Guide to ..." This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Tanya Steele.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLTZgqSAjQs [youtube.com]