Australian Federal Court Awards Damages To Artist For False Copyright Claim

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."

The defendant didn't show up

[nedlohs]

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.

Background Findings from FCA 62

[OzPeter]

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.

But if you're not a corporation, you lack

[tepples]

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:The defendant didn't show up

[dkleinsc]

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.

False contradiction

[Another, completely]

The lost sales weren't due to copyright violations, they were due to a baseless legal action (actually, a threat of a baseless legal action) to enforce a non-existent copyright. It's easy for a person to think copyright is over-zealously enforced in general, and also be happy that people fail spectacularly when they try to use that zealous enforcement on copyrights they don't even have claim to.

Re:So let me get this straight...

[Anonymous Coward]

This wasn't about "lost sales" or "misappropriation of the artists material", this was about somebody else trying to prevent Mr Bell from using his own material by claiming that they owned it. Essentially using the legal system to bully somebody, that's a different scenario to what you're suggesting. Don't think you're going to get many hands...

Re:The defendant didn't show up

[UnknowingFool]

It doesn't really set any precedence. To do that there must be something meaningful in the judgement other than summary judgement because one side did not appear. An example of precedence is Lenz v. Universal [wikipedia.org] which established

Copyright holders must consider fair use before issuing takedown notices for content posted on the internet.

Re:So let me get this straight...

[cpu6502]

(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.

Re:I wish this would happen in the USA

[Rasperin]

No they were winning, but with the recent criminal charges against it, they dropped it (was an article on wired yesterday, which means it's likely week old news).