Friday’s Endnotes – 08/19/16

Public “Selective” Knowledge — Steve Tepp writes, “Disagreement on law and policy in the field of copyright have become routine. But in the past few weeks, Public Knowledge has crossed the line of civil and intellectual debate, levelling ad hominem attacks against the widely respected U.S. Copyright Office, claiming it ‘has a long history of being bad at its job, and misrepresenting the law.’ But a critical review of Public Knowledge’s own statements reveals that these attacks are baseless, self-serving, and hypocritical.”

The Internet’s Safe Harbor Did Not Just Become A Little Less Safe — Franklin Graves looks at the August 8 decision in BMG v Cox, where the Eastern District of Virginia upheld a jury verdict finding an ISP liable for contributory copyright infringement. Says Graves, “From a corporate prospective, a business has two choices when faced with an arguably gray area of the law. First, they can comply to the best of their ability with statutory requirements as they stand and proceed with disputing the requirement. Alternatively, they can ignore then-current legal requirements, take the chance of being wrong, and suffer the consequences if found to be in violation at a later date. Simply because an ISP has decided to fight the system and lost doesn’t mean the entire system is broken.”

Cloudflare’s desperate new strategy to protect pirate sites — Devlin Hartline on the latest litigation involving Cloudflare. “In April of 2015, several record label plaintiffs sued MP3Skull for copyright infringement, easily obtaining a default judgment when the defendants failed to respond to the suit. Earlier this year, the plaintiffs were granted a permanent injunction, which the defendants quickly flouted by setting up shop under several different top-level domains. Naturally, the common denominator of these multiple MP3Skull sites was that they used CloudFlare. The plaintiffs’ lawyers sent a copy of the injunction against the pirate sites to CloudFlare, asking it to honor the injunction and stop supplying services to the enjoined domains. But, as with Grooveshark, CloudFlare again refused to comply.”

Appeals Court Upholds U.S. Government’s Seizure of Megaupload’s Mega-Millions — The Fourth Circuit is having none of Dotcom’s nonsense, rejecting all his arguments in the civil asset forfeiture proceeding that is running concurrent with the criminal case. In part, the appellate court relied on evidence from the district court that Dotcom intended to avoid prosecution, writing, “For example, Kim Dotcom posted a message to Twitter stating ‘HEY DOJ, we will go to the U.S. No need for extradition. We want bail, funds unfrozen for lawyers & living expenses.’ The court rightly found this and other public statements to strongly suggest Dotcom was resisting extradition to posture for criminal proceedings, using the ability to avoid prosecution as leverage.”

It’s Guest Blog Wednesday featuring Tom Kennedy! — An interview with Tom Kennedy, executive director of the American Society of Media Photographers, who, along with American Photographic Artists, Digital Media Licensing Association, Graphic Artists Guild, Nature Photographers of North America, National Press Photographers Association, and Professional Photographers of America (PPA), have been working hard to create a copyright small claims process in the US Copyright Office.