Last week saw an important victory in the battle to protect the fair use of copyrighted material online. A Federal Appeals Court held in Lenz v. Universal that the DMCA requires rights holders to consider the important doctrine of ‘fair use’ before issuing a takedown notification. We submitted an amicus brief in this case, and are very pleased to see the court agree with many of our arguments.
Behold, the dancing baby that started the whole thing off:
The outcome of the case underlines and highlights the importance of fair use, and will hopefully cause copyright holders to pause and take the doctrine more seriously than many of them have done in the past.
In the words of the court:
Fair use is not just excused by the law, it is wholly authorized by the law.
This is critical. Sharing excerpts of articles, commenting on the news, and re-blogging portions of popular blog posts have become the lifeblood of the social internet, and important to the community we are building on WordPress.com. We have long fought to preserve legitimate rights to fair use, through the courts, through education of users and copyright holders and by pushing back on DMCA notices that target fair use on WordPress.com. In the last reporting period, we rejected 43% of notices for being either incomplete or abusive.
Our approach to honoring fair use is not meant to help our users to ‘get away’ with anything; we are defending their wholly legitimate rights from abuse. With that in mind, it is heartening to see that the 9th circuit agree with us: fair use is fundamental to copyright law, and all valid DMCA requests must give fair use due consideration.
Not the end of the story
Despite the importance of the decision, we shouldn’t be cracking out the champagne just yet. For one, we wish the court had taken the opportunity to provide a clearer, more objective standard for the consideration of fair use than they have. In our amicus brief we argued strongly for requiring complainants to form an objective belief that material in question was not fair use before submitting a takedown notification. The court relied instead on a subjective standard, that will be difficult to enforce, and provides less deterrent against the trampling of fair use rights.
Most of all, we hope the decision causes rights holders to take a closer look at their process for evaluating potential infringing activity, particularly those who make use of third party agents to send bulk automated takedowns. We have always believed that this process is nuanced, and requires some sort of human review to prevent abuse. We would like the Lenz decision to act as a catalyst for more thoughtful use of the DMCA’s notification and takedown process. There needs to be a recognition that simply finding a ‘matching’ file or text algorithmically does not signal the end of the investigation process, but just the beginning. This sentiment was expressed by Judge Smith in the opinion, who noted that while automated systems can be a useful tool for identifying the use of copyrighted material, that does not mean that they are capable of analyzing whether that use is fair, and therefore legal.
The battle to protect fair use isn’t over by a long shot, but for now – the baby dances on.
Read more over at the EFF.
Header image by Kjell Reigstad.
Transparency Report 