RIAA President Cary Sherman recently posted a statement responding to last week’s summary judgement in the Viacom lawsuit against YouTube decrying the decision as a “dangerously expansive reading of the liability immunity provisions of the DMCA.” He also called it “bad public policy.”
He went on to claim the decision will “will actually discourage service providers from taking steps to minimize the illegal exchange of copyrighted works on their sites.”
This is nothing surprising coming from the RIAA. Like the MPAA and Business Software Alliance (BSA), they have consistently argued service providers should be responsibile for identifying copyright infringement rather than the content owners themselves.
But as Judge Louis Stanton pointed out in his decision on YouTube’s DMCA defense, this responsibility falls solely on the shoulders of the content owners except in rare cases where the infringement is obvious without any investigation.
He wrote, “The DMCA is explicit: it shall not be construed to condition “safe harbor” protection on “a service provider monitoring its service or affirmatively seeding facts indicating infringing activity.””
Judge Stanton went on to explain, “the present case shows that the DMCA notification regime works efficiently,” pointing out that it took less than a single business day for YouTube to remove nearly 100,000 videos once they received Viacom’s takedown notices.
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Result for: taking steps
Motorola has announced that it will be splitting off its mobile phone business into a seperate company by 2009.
The move is seen as a way to acquiesce to the demands of major investor Carl Icahn and the split will leave Motorola as a company that makes TV set-top boxes, wireless equipment, public-safety radios and bar-code scanners.
Motorola CEO Greg Brown has this to say about the latest move. “The decision will provide improved flexibility, more tailored capital structures, and increased management focus - as well as more targeted investment opportunities for our shareholders.”
“Clearly there’s a lot more work to be done,” Brown added. “It will be a product-led recovery. We’re taking steps now to ensure and solidify that direction.”
