Hello, and thanks again to Walter Olson for welcoming me back to help fill in this week. His prior post reminded me of this surveillance tape I’ve kept after all these years simply for comic relief.

The tape shows one customer casually stroll through the door without incident all the while another intending customer in quite the hurry tries to run in–he thought–through an open door. Instead, it was the plate glass adjacent to the door. He smacks into it bowing the glass and then storms into the store while the other customers gawk at him. The original clip was without sound but I couldn’t resist jazzing it up with Gonna Fly Now from Rocky.

Here’s the Overlawyered part: he made a claim against the store owner; and, the claim was paid as a compromise. Part of the reason why is visible on the video—can you see it?

They seem now to be part of the accepted armament of campaign law. “Of course the McCain-Palin team could counter-notify, but the DMCA’s 10-14 business day waiting period makes that option next to useless, when ‘10 days can be a lifetime in a political campaign.’” (Seltzer/Citizen Media Law, Levy/CL&P; but see Ron Coleman, Oct. 15: process need not be as slow as waiting period implies).

Related: Does trademark law allow candidates to suppress some types of opposition keyword advertising, as when candidates put up negative ads keyed to each others’ names? [Levy/CL&P]

YouTube received a flurry of takedown notices, but “quickly realized something was fishy, and began investigating.” It “rapidly became clear” that the entities filing the takedown demands “did not hold the copyrights to the materials they claimed to be infringed, including footage from a Clearwater City Commission meeting and a man-on-the-street interview. In addition, many of these videos were obvious fair uses, such as independent news reports.” (Eva Galperin, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Sept. 25)(via Ardia).

This one ends differently than most (Lessig Blog, Sept. 22 via TechDirt & O’Keefe).

Benjamin Legeri, a/k/a BennyBaby, wants $1 million in damages, saying he wouldn’t have posted sketch and parody videos had he known he wouldn’t get a chance to be cut in on the ad revenue. (David Chartier, “YouTube user sues Google for his slice of the traffic”, Ars Technica, Aug. 15).

A few seconds of musical background, in the form of Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy”, was grounds enough for Universal to file a takedown notice with YouTube. (Nate Anderson, “Universal demands takedown of homemade dancing toddler clip; EFF sues”, ArsTechnica, Jul. 25).

Reuters reports on a nuvo-media catfight — and just look who the cat drags in:

Google Inc. took a swipe at media conglomerate Viacom Inc., which is suing the Internet search leader and its video sharing site YouTube for $1 billion over “massive copyright infringement.”

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, speaking with reporters at a hotel bar at the 25th annual Allen & Co. moguls meeting, said litigation was the foundation of the company that owns the MTV Networks, Paramount movies studio, and video game developer Harmonix.

“Viacom is a company built from lawsuits, look at their history,” Schmidt said on early Friday.

He makes that sound like a bad thing!

Needless alarmism, or logical extrapolation from RIAA’s willingness to sue small-fry individual music-sharers along with the grandparents whose computers they had borrowed?

According to some legal experts, YouTube’s uploading community could find itself in the line of fire. … Centralized source or no, Christopher Norgaard, intellectual property attorney and partner in the Los Angeles office of Ropers Majeski Kohn & Bentley, said he believes YouTube and its users face a significant risk of exposure to secondary liability for copyright infringement. Secondary liability can be either contributory, meaning inducement of infringement, or vicarious, meaning profiting from infringement while failing to exercise a right to stop it.

(Jennifer LeClaire, “Are YouTube Users at Risk in Viacom Suit?”, NewsFactor, Mar. 16).

Wendy Seltzer tries a little experiment, posting a video on YouTube of the NFL’s copyright notice displayed at the Super Bowl, not the football play itself. It takes five days for the takedown notice to arrive. (Feb. 13, Dec. 15)(via Volokh).

The Wisconsin lawprof has this to say (Jul. 19) on that copyright-infringement lawsuit that we mentioned in passing yesterday, the one aimed at the hit site for hosting a video of the beating of Reginald Denny:

Robert Tur, who could have just asked YouTube to remove the video someone had uploaded, instead left it there and then sued demanding $150,000 for each of the 1,000+ viewings that occurred. YouTube took the video down when the lawsuit called attention to the problem.

Well, we knew eventually someone would sue YouTube, but could it be anyone less sympathetic then a guy who once got lucky and was there with a camera when someone else was getting beaten up?

More in her comments section.