In the digital age, it is hard to imagine that personal photocopying still poses much of a worry for copyright owners. Isn’t the real problem, after all, the ability to make perfect copies and to share them instantly with thousands of others? Traditional photocopying poses neither of these dangers, and personal copying is a long settled fair use, isn’t it?

Not, apparently, for Access Copyright, the Canadian copyright licensing agency that, like its US counterpart the Copyright Clearance Center, collects and distributes permission fees for various uses of copyrighted material. Access Copyright has recently filed a lawsuit seeking 10 million dollars – the largest damages award ever sought for copyright infringement in Canada – from the office supply chain Staples. Their claim is that Staples should be liable for infringing copying done by customers on equipment provided by the stores. There is a news report on the suit from the Canadian Press here, a negative assessment from P2Pnet here, and a comment from a Canadian professor of IP and technology law here.

To prove secondary liability on the part of Staples, Access Copyright will have to convince a court that Staples should be held responsible for copying done by its customers. As Professor Geist points out, that may be a difficult hurdle to clear. In Canada, as in the US, liability for those who merely supply the equipment to make copies is rare; the US provides statutory protection for libraries in such cases and the Canadian Supreme Court has established a similar “presumption” in favor of Canadian libraries. Explaining why that presumption should not apply to Staples will be a challenge for this lawsuit.

But the issue that should really worry us, the issue that makes this a radial attempt to change the terms of the copyright bargain rather than merely a desperate ploy to protect a new source of revenue as traditional sources dry up, is that Access Copyright will have to show that the personal copying done by customers is direct infringement of copyright. Only if that is true can Staples be held secondarily liable for providing the means for that infringement. But personal copying has been almost universally believed to be fair use (or, in Canada, “fair dealing”). Students have made single copies of journal articles and book chapters for their own study for as long as photocopies have existed, and consumers have made personal copies of TV shows with their own VCRs with the blessing of the US Supreme Court. So what has changed?

The clue is in the fact that this suit was brought by a licensing agency, not by publishers or authors. What we are seeing here is a new assertion that personal copying was never legal, only tolerated by copyright owners until they could create a mechanism to collect payments. The same digital technologies that have allowed so much infringement also now allow content owners to efficiently offer licenses and collect payments for individual uses that could never have supported a market before. Although it is still more efficient to sue the alleged contributory infringer instead of the consumer who is the direct infringer, this saber rattling by a licensing agency should tell us quite clearly that content owners intend to move toward a pay-per-use model. If such suits are successful, every consumer-made copy logged at a store or even at a library photocopier could be subject to small payments, which would be administered through an online licensing agency.

At a recent conference in Washington, DC, Cary Sherman, the President of the Recording Industry Association of American, refused to acknowledge that personal copying of a music CD for listening on an individual MP3 player was fair use. Instead he said that this likely was infringement, but that the industry had agreed internally not to pursue such cases. The Canadian lawsuit suggests that, if a precedent can be set regarding the much less contested area of personal photocopying, any such forbearance around consumer copying will quickly become a thing of the past.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association, which has recently grabbed some headlines with its complaint to the Federal Communications Commission about misleading and over-broad copyright warnings, has just released a report it commissioned on “Fair Use in the U.S. Economy.” The purpose of this report is to “measure the footprint of fair use on the U.S. economy,” and its conclusion is startling.   Industries that benefit substantially from fair use, says the report, employ over 10 million people and account for about one-sixth of the total U.S. GNP. That is a big footprint!

The PDF of the full report is available here.

In the past I have objected to claims made by the copyright industry about the amount of money lost through unauthorized file sharing or piracy. Those figures, I have suggested, are over-inflated and conjectural because they rely on lost opportunity costs and do not account for the economic benefits that might be gained from these activities. Now that the CCIA has decided to look at the economic equation from the other end and examine what benefits fair use (legal uses, as opposed to piracy and file-sharing) provides to the economy, it seems fair to ask how reliable its figures are.

The study, which was done by consultants from Capital Trade, a firm specializing in consulting and analysis of international trade, identifies “core industries” that “derive a significant amount of their current business from the demand generated by fair use and the Internet.” It is hard to argue that search engines, for example, have fair use at the center of their business. Other sectors, like consumer electronics, certainly are dependent on fair use, but one could argue that both purchased content and “pirated” content reduce the share of that industry that is dependent on fair use. Education, in this report, is also apparently identified as a core industry, since it depends heavily on the non-copyrightability of facts as well as other fair use freedoms. Other non-core sectors are also examined when their businesses “facilitate the output of the fair use core.” The identification of these industries and the measures used to evaluate their economic impact, are based on the WIPO recommendations for studying the role of knowledge industries in the world economy.

In so far as its conclusions are understood to show the economic impact of industries that would be significantly harmed by a narrowing of fair use, it seems a careful and clearly defensible effort to remind us that usability of information is as important to oar economy as is its creation. Without fair use, many of these industries would not go away altogether, but they would be badly hampered and would contribute much less to the U.S. economy. We have heard so much about the important economic impact of the industries that create copyrighted content; it seems like a vital counter-balance to consider the impact of those industries that benefit from the legal, unlicensed use of that content.

Technically, copyright misuse is a defense that has been recognized in the federal courts but is not codified in our copyright law. In a misuse claim, if a copyright owner is found to be claiming more copyright protection than the law gives, that owner may be barred from enforcing any copyright protection until they stop making the exaggerated claim. Someone sued for infringement can raise the defense that the copyright owner has claimed too much and a court may find that even genuine infringement should be excused on that basis.

In a recent complaint to the Federal Trade Commission, however, a computer industry group took the copyright misuse defense and went on the offensive. The Computer & Communications Industry Association has filed a complaint with the FTC alleging that the National Football League, Major League Baseball, NBC/Universal and several other large content producers are engaging in unfair and deceptive trade practices by claiming copyright protection they are not entitled to. One example, discussed earlier on this site, is the copyright warning read on sports broadcasts that claims to prohibit “accounts and descriptions of this game” without written permission from the sports organizations. In spite of this dire warning, the NFL cannot prevent a water-cooler discussion of last night’s game; accounts and descriptions of the facts of the event are fine unless they are “substantially similar” to copyrighted expression, and even repeating the words of a broadcast description may be fair use, which, by definition, is permitted without authorization.

What the CCIA essentially is complaining about is copyright misuse – exaggerated claims designed to intimidate consumers and prevent them from doing things they are perfectly free to do under the law. On offense it is called an unfair trade practice; on defense it would be copyright misuse. But whichever side of the ball we are on, the idea that copyright claims can be overstated is important; consumers and users should understand the genuine contours of copyright protection and take full advantage of the educational and creative uses that the law does permit.

Read an Electronic Freedom Foundation blog post on the filing here.

For those who are interested, you can find the complete complain here.

Two weeks ago the Copyright Clearance Center announced that it would offer a “blanket” license to college and university campus for permission to copy and distribute copyright protected material to students. The license offers to replace the time-consuming struggle to get and pay for permissions with a single yearly bill. Unfortunately, the blanket licenses apparently will not cover all, or even most, of the material frequently used by college classes. Even more unfortunately, dependence on a blanket license will further discourage university faculty members from considering whether or not their use of specific material is fair use. Fair use, like many other rights granted by law, can atrophy if it is not exercised.

In his current column in the Financial Times’ “New Technology Policy Forum,” Duke Law Professor James Boyle makes this point succintly and eloquently. He explains much more clearly than I can why the price tag on such a license, regardless of its monetary cost, may be much too high. His column should be read by anyone who wonders if a blanket license might relieve the uncertainties and stresses of relying on fair use. The consequences of such a decision, Boyle suggests, might in the long run be far more harmful to higher education.

It seems to be a monthly occurrence; an editorial appears in a major news outlet advocating stricter copyright legislation and enforcement. This week it was the San Francisco Chronicle, which published on Monday an opinion piece from two attorneys who have just launched a class action lawsuit against Google over videos posted in YouTube. The acquisition of YouTube by deep-pocketed Google has clearly made it a tempting target, and class actions are notoriously lucrative, especially for the attorneys, if they can get past the formidable obstacle of class certification. Authors Louis Solomon and William Hart claim to represent the interests of “large and small copyright holders whose creative works have been posted and reposted [to YouTube] without authorization.”

Solomon and Hart make a number of conclusory statements in their editorial that deserve closer scrutiny. For one thing, they repeatedly assert that YouTube’s “very business model depend[s] on the unauthorized exploitation of copyrighted material.” They say there is “no legitimate constituency” for that business model and ask, rhetorically, what Google thought was the main source of value when they bought YouTube if not “the copyrighted works of others.” All of this ignores the large number of user-created works that are posted to YouTube with explicit permission granted by the creator/user who uploads the video. Of course YouTube depends on copyrighted works created by others, but many of those creators want to have their work available in this forum; these creators are not being exploited, they are being offered an outlet for their creativity that would not otherwise be available.

By ignoring the legitimate users of YouTube, Solomon and Hart reveal that the fundamental purpose of this lawsuit, like that filed earlier this year by Viacom against YouTube, is to undermine some settled legal principles. This kind of attack on new techonologies dates back into the 1970s, when some movies studios sued to prevent the distribution of consumer video recorders. The Supreme Court ruled that a technology could not be suppressed if it had a “substantial non-infringing use.” YouTube obviously has such uses, but the various plaintiffs are clearly hoping that our now more business-friendly federal courts will reverse or revise that standard to give content producers stricter control over technological innovation.

Another target of the lawsuit is the “safe-harbor” provision inserted into the Copyright Act in 2000 by the DMCA to protect online service providers from liability for the actions of their consumers. The content industry is hoping that the 2005 Supreme Court decision in MGM v. Grokster offers an opportunity to reverse in the courts what Congress did by legislation and force online hosts, who are easier and wealthier targets than individuals are, to assume the risks and costs for user behavior.

Finally, Solomon and Hart assert in response to an anticipated defense that “no one has a First Amendment right to infringe” copyright. This is true as far as it goes, but it overlooks the fact that some apparent infringements are immunized by law precisely because of the danger that copyright could be used to suppress legitimate and socially desirable speech. Sections 107-122 of the Copyright Act all enact “limitations on exclusive rights” designed to allow conduct that would otherwise be infringing but which Congress believed should be protected. The Supreme Court has said that “the Framers intended copyright itself to be the engine of free expression” (Harper and Row v. Nation Magazine, 471 U.S. 599 (1985), and YouTube can legitimately argue that the opportunity it offers for such expression gives it a social value that tips the copyright balance in its favor.

I am generally wary of relying too heavily on Google to fight all of the battles in copyright law, mostly because their interests and those of higher education don’t always seem very similar. But a fair use win for Google is usually good news for us as well, and the case decided recently (here is the decision in Perfect 10 v. Google) by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is important on a number of points.

The Court of Appeals variously upheld and reversed parts of the previous district court ruling, but the upshot was that fair use was found for three specific activities: the routine caching that computers must do to display web pages, in-line linking and framing of web pages where the target page never resides on the server controlled by the web author doing the linking, and using thumbnail versions to index images found elsewhere on the web. None of these holdings are unique or new, but the Ninth Circuit does a nice job of explaining the technology involved and the reasoning behind its ruling. The “server test” used to find that in-line linking is not an infringement seems so simple and intuitive that one has to fear that other courts will try to complicate it. Linking, of course, is an important way that higher education tries to avoid infringement, so it is nice to be reassured.

As for caching, it seems amazing that we should have to be reminded, but the Court’s analysis is clear and useful:

[E]ven assuming such automatic copying could constitute direct infringement, it is fair use in this context… a cache copies no more than is necessary to assist the user in Internet use… Such automatic background copying has no more than a minimal effect on Perfect 10’s rights, but a considerable public benefit.

The only rain on Google’s parade is some language about secondary liability (liability for contributing to direct infringement by someone else) that could pose problems for Google in that part of the present case, which was remanded to the lower court, and in the future. An nice explanation of the potential harm in this part of the opinion is available here on Prof. Wendy Seltzer’s blog. For higher ed., however, this case is a nice reminder of principles that are necessary and ought to be obvious.

A colleague has recently posted a comment wondering about the impact of a piece of legislation suggested to the Congress this week by Attorney General Gonzales’ office, the “Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007.” In a letter sent to the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate, the AG proposes a series of amendments that would increase the enforcement of, and penalties for, criminal copyright infringement.

For most of our history, copyright has been an entirely civil matter, where an aggrieved party would sue the infringer directly for money damages and, sometimes, an injunction to stop the infringement. Only in recent years have we included criminal infringement in the law, where the government itself prosecutes the infringer and penalties can include fines and jail time. Most infringement is still handled through civil suits, but section 506(a) of the Copyright Act now defines criminal infringement in pretty broad terms. For infringement to be prosecuted as a crime, it must be willful, done for commercial advantage or financial gain, and involve either the copying and distribution of works with a total retail value of $1,000 or more or the distribution of a commercial work on a public network. This definition is broad enough to catch many activities like file-sharing in the criminal net, as it is intended to do, but it could also conceivably be used to prosecute other activities that occur in higher education, if the courts were to interpret “willful” and “commercial advantage” broadly enough.

The proposed changes to the law of criminal infringement include increasing penalties (up to life imprisonment for counterfeiting activities that result in a death), including “attempted infringement” as a new offense, giving wiretap authority for infringement investigations and making it easier for authorities to seize materials used in criminal infringement.

While some of these changes seem like a bad idea to me (like the notion of attempted infringement), it is not clear what impact they would have on the fair use provision that is so important to higher education. Presumably a reasonable reliance on fair use would defeat the willfulness requirement for criminal penalties to apply. My broader concern is that the increasing treatment of copyright infringement as a criminal offense is fundamentally opposed to the purpose of intellctual property law as expressed in the Constitution. Congress is allowed to make law around copyrights and patent rights in order “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.” This justification reminds us that intellectual property is a public good and is thus different from physical property. Once we start treating copyright law as protection for a purely private property interest, similiar to laws against car theft, we step outside the rationale for federal action. Criminal law is usually a matter for the states, and Congress should remember that the reason it is given the power to legislate in this area is precisely because more is involved in copyright than mere private interests.

With a new round of litigation threats from the Recording Industry of America, there has been a lot of attention, and confusion, about what obligations internet service providers have to respond when notified of allegedly infringing activity. The phrase “take-down notice” is beginning to enter our collective vocabulary, but it is important to understand to which situations it does, or does not, apply.

The take down notice is a product of section 512(c) of the Copyright Act, added by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998, and it is applicable only when the allegedly infringing material resides on the servers owned by the internet service provider. There is substantial evidence that these notices are used by content owners to remove critical material from the web even when the claim of copyright infringement is very weak.

A recent, almost comic, contratemps between law professor Wendy Seltzer and the NFL nicely illustrates how take-down notices work. Prof. Seltzer copied and uploaded to YouTube a short section of the Super Bowl broadcast — the part where they read that overly broad copyright warning that says that even “descriptions and accounts” of the game must be authorized by the NFL — in order to illustrate the absurd claims that some copyright owners use to try to frighten people from making legitimate uses of content. The NFL promptly sent a take-down notice to YouTube, which removed the video and notified Professor Seltzer. She responded with the statutory counter-notification that asserted her posting of the video clip was fair use, and YouTube put the video back. Then the whole cycle was repeated again. The clip, restored for the second time on April 4, is still on YouTube as of today, and Prof. Seltzer has certainly made her point about how copyright assertions, and especially the DMCA take-down procedure, can have a chilling effect on legitimate expression. (See Wendy Seltzer’s blog as well as the “Chilling Effect Clearinghouse“).

But when infringing material does not reside on the service providers’ own equipment (as clips in YouTube reside on Google-owned servers), then neither the take-down notice and counter-notice nor the expedited subpoena process apply. Thus, in cases of peer-to-peer file sharing, where the infringing material is only transmitted over the service provider’s network but is not stored or maintained on that network, the 512(c) procedure can not be used.

So what is the RIAA sending to universities regarding file sharing? The recent batch of letters sent to university DMCA agents, who are designated to receive take-down notices, have taken two forms. One is a “settlement offer” that is identified only by an IP address and that asks the institution to pass on to the student associated with that address. When and if the letter is passed on to the correct student, that person is told to go to a specified website and settle the claim for infringement or risk being sued. Since this procedure saves the RIAA the time and trouble of getting a subpoena to learn the identity of each student alleged to be sharing files, it is much more efficient for the RIAA; it puts the institution in the middle instead.

Some schools have responding by saying that they do not retain server logs long enough to match the dynamic IP addresses referenced in these settlement letters to the offending student, so the RIAA has added another letter, demanding that the institutions retain records in anticipation of possible litigation. Whether or not this demand is legally enforcable is a debated issue, but many universities are complying with both letters out of concern not to leave students unaware of their risk of litigation. So now the “chilling effect” that has long been associated with the DMCA is being exploited to save time and increase settlement revenues for the recording industry.