3 Count: Turnabout is Fair Use

This is daily column on Plagiarism Today where the site brings you three of the days biggest, most important copyright and plagiarism news links. If you want to offer your feedback on the column, use the contact form or just follow me on Twitter at @plagiarismtoday.

1: Pornographic videos flood YouTube

Yesterday, YouTube was raided by members of the 4Chan message boars, who uploaded score of pornographic clips to the site, many of which were labeled as children’s videos and begin with such content before cutting to graphic content. Some of the affected videos were for music groups among kids, including the Jonas Brothers.

Why would a group of people work tirelessly to expose children to pornography? According to at least one poster it was because “YouTube keeps deleting music”. Whether this is the cause for the entire raid, remains to be seen.

Though YouTube worked quickly to remove the videos, thumbnails for many of them lingered long after the videos were pulled down and were available through a variety of searches. As of this writing, YouTube appears to have eliminated the videos for the most part and searches are working normally.

2: At RealDVD hearing, MPAA says copying DVDs never legal

It appears that Real’s claims about about fair use in the RealDVD case might have a new wrinkle. The MPAA has requested an estoppel ruling form the judge in the case that would bar Real from arguing fair use in the case. The reason? Real had argued the exact opposite about ten years ago in a similar case and won on those grounds.

The previous case dealt with Streambox VCR, a product that allowed the downloading and storing of Real’s streaming music and video, saying in part that, “The DMCA does not have a fair use exception allowing individuals to circumvent access and copy protection measures.”

Real, for their part, compared DVDs to CDs, where the copying of the data onto your hard drive (for example, iTunes) is an understood fair use and standard practice.

The judge heard closing arguments on the hearing and did not issue a ruling. That will be handed down at a later date.

3: Wikimedia Foundation to Add Creative Commons License for All Content

Finally today, The Wikimedia Foundation, which includes Wikipedia, has added the Creative Commons BY-SA license to all of their content. Under the current system, existing content will be dual-licensed and new content will be CC-BY-SA licensed only.

The CC license was chosen because of requirements of GFDL, the former license, that made reusing content in Wikipedia difficult. Those requirements included the requirement to copy the full license along with any reuse of the content, which could have hindered many uses of the work.

This change was made possible in November of 2008 when the Free Software Foundation updated the GFDL license to allow double licensing and portability. This decision has not been approved by the board of directors at Wikimedia but was supported by over 75% of all voters in a recent Wikipedia survey.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today, we’ll be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

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