3 Count: Front Page News

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1: 11th Circuit Sides with Medical Blog in Copyright Fight

First off today, Kayla Goggin at Courthouse News Service reports that the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has sided with a medical blog in ruling that an RSS feed does not grant another party an implied license to republish their content.

The case pitted the blog ThriveAP against news aggregator Newstex, formerly known as ACI Information Group. Newstex sued ACI in 2018 after the company began scraping the site’s RSS feed and publishing it in a subscription service that was available to academic libraries.

In the lower court, ThriveAP won after a four-day trial, rejecting ACI’s argument that ThriveAP’s choice to include a full RSS feed was an “implied license” to copy and redistribute it. As such, ACI appealed but the 11th Circuit upheld the jury verdict, saying that ACI had failed to prove distributing content via an RSS feed granted such a license. At the lower court, ACI was ordered to pay $202.500 in statutory damages,

2: Mail on Sunday Must Publish Front Page Statement of Meghan Copyright Win

Next up today, The BBC is reporting that the British tabloid The Mail on Sunday has been ordered to publish a front-page statement about the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Merkle, and her recent copyright victory over the paper. The MailOnline, the paper’s online component, must also publish the statement for a week.

The lawsuit came about when The Mail began publishing a series of articles that centered around a private letter Merkle wrote to her estranged father. Previously, she won both her privacy claim and most her copyright claim against the paper. However, in addition to monetary damages, the judge in the case is now ordering The Mail to give similar, but “modest”, space to the retraction and apology as it did the original story.

For its part, The Mail has already sought permission to appeal the ruling and has promised to do as such. In addition to such an appeal, a trial is still expected to be held on part of the copyright claim, namely whether Merkle is the exclusive copyright holder in the letter.

3: UPS Removes Too $hort & E-40’s Music Video Over Copyright Dispute

Finally today, Madusa S. as Hot New Hip Hop writes that a music video uploaded by rapper Too $hort and his collaborator E-40 has been removed YouTube due to a copyright infringement claim by the delivery company UPS.

In the video, entitled Ain’t Gone Do It, the two rappers (as well as other characters) donned fake UPS uniforms and drove a fake UPS van while making deliveries in a comedic fashion. However, someone at UPS did not enjoy the joke and requested the video be removed on copyright grounds.

The choice of copyright is interesting as the UPS logo and uniform would seem to be better protected by trademark. Nonetheless, that does appear to be why the video was removed and that leaves only non-video versions of the song and non-official uploads of the original video.

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