The CopyKat

The animal right organisation People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has filed an appeal against a lower court's decision in January this year that declined to give the macaque monkey Naruto the right to his famous selfie taken in Indonesia in 2011. The appeal brief was filed at the Northern District of California.

Malibu Media — the online erotic film producer and alleged copyright troll — has been told that when filing against anonymous “John Doe” defendants whose identities are just an IP addresses for their Internet service, they cannot use geolocation tools to more precisely identify these alleged infringers. Malibu had argued that it had used “proven IP address geolocation technology which has consistently worked in similar cases to ensure that the Defendant’s acts of copyright infringement occurred using an [IP address] traced to a physical address located within this District.” The District Court was having none of that writing that “The allegation that the IP address at issue likely resolves to a physical address in this District is not supported in any of the declarations filed in connection with the instant motion.” and a second District Court said “Plaintiff fails to offer any evidence to support its allegation that the infringing IP address was actually traced to a location within this judicial district" and “Nothing in the declarations Plaintiff submitted with its Ex Parte Motion explains what steps Plaintiff took to trace the IP address to a physical point of origin within this Court’s jurisdiction.”

Can the unauthorised reproduction and making available of clips of cricket matches lasting up to 8 seconds amount to an infringement of copyright in works lasting several days hours minutes about this exciting and fast-paced sport? As Elonora tell us over on the IPKat, the answer is unsurprisingly yes -  and the use is not protected by the doctrine of fair use nor by 'safe harbour' - confirmed by Arnold J in his 174-paragraph judgment in England And Wales Cricket Board Ltd & Another v Tixdaq Ltd & Another [2016] EWHC 575 (Ch).

The German head of digital-economy policy at the European Commission, Günther Oettinger, is considering rolling out  German and Spanish “Google tax” on the wider EU stage. Oettinger’s department published a consultation on Wednesday that covers this “neighboring rights” issue (more commonly referred to as “ancillary copyright”). The consultation will run until June 15. This, and a review of the "freedom of panorama" too! Eleonora explains all on the IPkat, and of course John tells us more on the 1709 Blog here and more on the World IP Review here

UK record label association the BPI has said that its members have now issued more than 200m takedown requests to Google for removal of copyright-infringing links. The trade association, which represents the three major recorded music labels, Universal, Sony and Warner as well as many independent labels, sent its first takedown request to Google in July 2011. In 2015 the BPI sent 65m takedown requests and they are now, perhaps understandably, calling for a more permanent solution – so when an offending link has been removed following a takedown request, it stays down, permanently. For a leading technology company, Google seem rather less than innovative in finding a way of achieving this.  In a press release, the BPI say: ‘This high-volume take-down helps to limit the amount of illegal content being promoted, giving legal music services such as Amazon, Apple, Spotify and Deezer a better chance of appearing at the top of search results when fans are looking for music online" but add “While this approach has contributed to some improved visibility of legal services, illegal results that are taken down by Google are frequently replaced by other illegal links, which means that legal services continue to be overshadowed by infringing sites in the very top search results" and “This damaging situation can only be remedied by Google themselves changing strategy and pro-actively pursuing a “notice and stay down” approach, so that once a piece of content has been notified for removal by the BPI, it isn’t indexed again for the same site and stays removed.” The BPI are also asking Google to hep promote websites with legal content, and ensure court decisions to block sites are respected. CEO Geoff Taylor said "“We are calling on Google and Bing to show their undiluted commitment to artists and the creative process by implementing a more pro-active solution to illegal sites appearing in search results. This will avoid the cost for both of us in dealing with hundreds of repeated notices for the same content on the same illegal sites”.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is being sued by award-winning wildlife photographers who say Trump is using their copyright-protected image of an American bald eagle without permission. Attorneys for Wendy Shattil and Robert Rozinski filed the civil complaint in federal court this week after watching a Trump presidential rally on television and noticing that an attendee was holding a campaign sign that incorporated one of their photographs of the national bird.

And finally, the software behind the epic Princess Mononoke,  Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle anime films, created by Studio Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki and called Toonz, is about to be made available as an open-sourced edition which will be available for download starting March 26th. Those aiming to up its power can opt for a paid, premium version - helping Toonz cement a place as the world standard in animation. More on the Creators Project here.

No go for John Doe show

Dominic Purcell as John Doe in the
eponymous 2002-2003 TV series

AF Holdings LLC, which claims to own numerous copyrights to pornographic films, and has been described as an 'arm' of the rather controversial copyright trolling law firm Prenda Law, has been rebuffed in it's bid to obtain subpoenas identifying information on 1,085 allegedly illegal downloaders. The District Court had ruled that AF could subpoena Internet service providers including Verizon Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp for identify information on subscribers whose computers were linked to downloads of the movie via the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol.  

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said that AF was not entitled to contact information for people whose Internet addresses were linked to downloads of the film “Popular Demand” because few of them live in the District of Columbia, where the case was filed, and it’s unlikely any connection exists among all of the Internet addresses subject to the subpoena: “It is quite obvious that AF Holdings could not possibly have had a good faith belief that it could successfully sue the overwhelming majority of the 1,058 John Doe defendants in this district” U.S. Circuit Judge David Tatel wrote, adding that “AF Holdings clearly abused the discovery process” and that the action was "a quintessential example of Prenda Law's modus operandi". The judgment is well worth a read and ends with

"Accordingly, we vacate the district court’s order and remand for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.  We leave it to the district court to determine what sanctions, if  any, are warranted for AF Holdings’s use of a possible  forgery in support of its claim. "

With a headline of "Crushing Blow for Copyright Trolls: Appeals Court Halts AF Holdings' Extortion Scheme" The EFF had this to say: "The case is one of hundreds around the country that follow the same pattern. A copyright troll looks for IP addresses that may have been used to download films (often adult films) via BitTorrent, files a single lawsuit against thousands of "John Doe" defendants based on those IP addresses, then seeks to subpoena the ISPs for the contact information of the account holders associated with those IP addresses. The troll then uses that information to contact the account holders and threatens expensive litigation if they do not settle promptly. Faced with the prospect of hiring an attorney and litigating the issue, often in a distant court, most subscribers-including those who may have done nothing wrong-will choose to settle rather than fight."

And over on the Register under the headline "Smut-spreading copyright trolls lose John Doe case" it's explained that 

"AF Holdings' last smackdown was in November 2013, when the US District Court of Minnesota found that it hadn't demonstrated ownership of the content claimed in a previous shakedown. That court ordered that the company return the money it had obtained from punters, as well as paying their legal costs. That ruling, however, didn't stop one of the two movies, Popular Demand, being the subject of the Columbia and then US Court of Appeals case.


AF Holdings was represented by Paul Duffy, who at the previous lower court hearings as associated with Prenda Law." 

More on the Washington Post here http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/05/27/prenda-law-was-a-porno-trolling-collective/

Killer Joe can sue John Doe: US judge rules against mass claims in copyright cases

A federal judge has ruled that copyright holders seeking to file suit against online pirates may not join multiple defendants into one suit, which might cause some headaches for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) who have widely used this tactic against filesharers.  In a December ruling in Iowa, Judge Stephanie Rose decided that copyright holders should no longer be permitted to file a single piracy case against so many defendants at once.

Judge Rose, in a series of rulings regarding the movies “Killer Joe”, “Sibling” and “The Company You Keep”,  found that a perceived link between multiple defendants was not justified saying “In the ‘Killer Joe’ cases the January defendants would have to be connected to the internet and still actively distributing data through the BitTorrent client approximately three months later to be involved in the same transaction as the April defendants, which is implausible at best” adding “Although each plaintiff has alleged that the defendants in each case were in the same swarm based on the same hash value, participation in a specific swarm is too imprecise a factor absent additional information relating to the alleged copyright infringement to support joinder”. She ruled that each case should be limited to one defendant because the plaintiffs have failed prove any guilt under the terms set out by the judge’s ruling as “Any ‘pieces’ of the work copied or uploaded by any individual [John] Doe may have gone to any other Doe, but may instead have gone to any of the potentially thousands of others who participated in a given swarm and are not in this case,” she wrote according to TorrentFreak.

Earlier this month we noted that a US federal judge in Washington, Robert Lasnick, ruled an individual’s IP address was not sufficient to actually implicate any particular person in copyright infringement - and that that IP address-only evidence fails to meet the pleading standards required to pursue for copyright infringement.

http://rt.com/usa/broad-piracy-lawsuits-judge-rule-437/