Salvatore (”Toto”) Cuffaro, a senator from Sicily, doesn’t seem to take well to criticism. [BoingBoing]
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Posts tagged as:
YouTube
They’re accelerating: Teenagers singing “Winter Wonderland” should not expect their videos to stay up. (Fred von Lohmann, EFF, via Ron Coleman).
TV’s biggest lawyer-advertiser is Boston’s James Sokolove, whose ad budget of $20 million/year makes him a widely recognized figure (and much parodized on YouTube). He’s reportedly offered $1,500 apiece for mesothelioma leads, seen his name in an episode of “The Sopranos”, and even advertised for patent plaintiffs. Turns out he hasn’t seen the inside of a courtroom in nearly thirty years, instead farming out his callers to others. [Boston mag via Ambrogi] “The message behind his ads, he says, is simple: Injured? Free money.”
Now his Sokolove Charitable Fund is giving him a shot at new respectability with help from no less august an institution than Stanford Law School (thank you, Prof. Deborah Rhode), It’s bankrolling something called the Roadmap to Justice Project, which will push the much-criticized-in-this-space “Civil Gideon” idea (a newly invented Constitutional entitlement to taxpayer coverage of lawyers’ fees in civil lawsuits).
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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?
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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).
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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).
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.
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