Copyright Internet Laws in the United States

Motion Picture Association of America

Rather than pursue legislation, in recent years the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has pursued agreements with ad agencies and payment processors, while a “copyright alert” system has been in place since 2013 in which major Internet providers give warnings to customers who have accessed infringing content.

“The Internet’s decentralized nature allows anyone around the world to contribute to its content and architecture, but that also means no single entity can solve problems that arise, like piracy,” Neil Fried, Motion Picture Association of America’s senior VP of government and regulatory affairs, wrote in a blog post on 2015: “That is why we are currently focusing our attention on forging cross-industry, voluntary initiatives to ensure a safe and innovative digital environment, rather than seeking a legislative rewrite of copyright policy.”

The Motion Picture Association of America is pressing the committee to look at the “role that search services play as a gateway by which many users discover and access sites involved in illegal activity.”

Hollywood’s Copyright Wars

By Christopher D. Cook (2012)

Another win for the Web in copyright infringement fights.

The battle over copyright protection on the Web is writ large in California. The state’s highest-profile industries – Hollywood entertainment and Internet technology – are the key combatants in a multi-round legal and economic wrestling match between producers of content and those who host it online over how to interpret the “safe harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). (17 U.S.C. Â§ 512(c).)

A Ninth Circuit ruling in UMG Recordings, Inc. v. Shelter Capital Partners, LLC (2011 WL 6357788) appears to solidify safe harbor protections for social media sites, enabling them to host copyrighted material posted by their users without being held immediately liable for copyright infringement. But with another major appeal pending (Viacom Int’l, Inc. v. YouTube, Inc., No. 10-3270 (2nd Cir.)) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R. 3261) temporarily shelved by Congress, the question of who should police online copyright infringements remains heavily contested.

At stake, legal onlookers say, is the future of both copyright law and Internet innovation – not to mention a whole lot of money. The music and entertainment industries have for years been trying to hold user-driven social media sites like Veoh (the prevailing defendant in the UMG case) and YouTube responsible for policing material that their users post. But in UMG, a three-judge Ninth Circuit panel affirmed in December what it called a “careful and comprehensive” 2009 decision by a federal district court in Los Angeles County that found Veoh well within the safe harbor protections of the DMCA, which Congress enacted in 1998.

In his 49-page opinion, Ninth Circuit Judge Raymond C. Fisher assailed UMG’s “novel theory” that safe harbor provisions should apply only to Web hosting services providing space on their servers for storing copyrighted materials – and not to those that also operate websites displaying or distributing such material. “UMG’s theory fails to account for the reality that web hosts, like Veoh, also store user-submitted materials in order to make those materials accessible to other Internet users.”

In an amicus brief, the Recording Industry Association of America, NBC Universal, and other trade groups had objected to the district court’s decision, arguing that it disrupts the DMCA’s “careful balance” of protections both for core Internet activities critical to its proper functioning, and for copyright owners vulnerable to “the virtually unlimited infringement of their rights that the Internet uniquely makes possible.”

But Corynne McSherry, intellectual property director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the UMG decision “helped affirm a stable legal environment. … It’s important for [Web] users to know that their content is going to be available … and that it’s a safe environment in which to innovate.” She contends, “If we create a world in which we hold people responsible for every little infringement, it stifles creativity.”

Looking beyond the UMG case, F. Jay Dougherty, a professor at Loyola Law School of Los Angeles who has worked as an attorney for movie studios, demurs, saying the courts “seem to be rejecting the arguments of copyright owners vigorously.” He anticipates that the Second Circuit will follow suit with its eventual Viacom v. YouTube ruling, leaving the two major U.S. copyright circuits with “a very broad interpretation of copyright harbors, very supportive of the Web business. … They are interpreting safe harbor in as broad a way as you can.”

Copyright battles in particular are shaped by economics, says Joseph C. Gratz, an attorney with San Franciscobased Durie Tangri who has represented Internet giants such as Google, Twitter, and Yelp. “If everybody agrees we don’t want infringing material, who’s going to pay the costs? Internet companies say Hollywood should pay for it, Hollywood is trying to get the Internet to pay.”

Copyright Laws on the Internet

Nowadays the Internet is a wide-open source for information and entertainment, and. All Internet users must assume that the work is copyrighted, unless otherwise stated. Read more about this issue in the American Encyclopedia of Law.

Copyright Protection: How it Works

When a person wants to Use Material on the Internet – Each day, people post vast quantities of creative material on the Internet — material that is available for free. Read more about this issue in the American Encyclopedia of Law

Copyright Issues on the Internet

During recent years, the Internet has become the basic foundational infrastructure for the global movement on data of all kinds. Read more about this issue in the American Encyclopedia of Law

Public domain and the Internet

Material that is available to the public via the Internet or other means is, in general, not public domain simply by reason of its being publicly available.Read more about this issue in the American Encyclopedia of Law

Internet Laws and Regulations

Copyright Internet Issues

Copyright is an intellectual property right which gives the owner the exclusive right to reproduce a copyright work. Work which is not protected by copyright (for example because the rights have expired) is said to be in the ‘public domain’ and may be copied and used freely. See also Plagarism.

Creative Commons Licence is a licence that allow creators to choose which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive, for their books or other creations, instead of applying a
blanket ‘all rights reserved’ copyright claim.

Copyright Internet Contents

Among other contents, it may be useful the following concepts:

Born-digital content Content which is originally published in a digital form and not print. It may be able to be printed but its original form is digital.
Cloud-based services Cloud computing is the use of hardware and software delivered as a service over a network, usually the internet.
Digital content: Books, magazines, images, and other information resources published in digital form. This includes both born-digital and those physical items which have been digitised. Formats include: databases, full text databases published on the internet, downloadable media such as music, e-books, e-journals , e-audio books, images and CD-ROMs.

See also file sharing in this Encyclopedia.

Copyright in the U.S. Code

The United States Copyright Code appears in Title 17 of the United State Code.

Copyright Internet Laws