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Sony Music issues takedown notice on copyright lecture
By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 18 February 2016
A YouTube video of a lecture on music copyright by Harvard Law professor William Fisher briefly went offline this week, due to a takedown notice issued by Sony Music. So that’s either ironic or appropriate, depending on how you look at it. I guess you could see it as a practical demonstration.
The takedown was triggered due to clips of music – various covers of ‘Little Wing’ by Jimi Hendrix – appearing in the video. Although this would be covered under the US’s fair use rules, the automated bots scouting around for videos to knock off the internet wouldn’t have known this.
This could be an interesting test of a ruling made in the US Ninth Circuit Court Of Appeals last year. In the long-running ‘dancing baby’ case, a dispute over a takedown notice issued by Universal Music Publishing on a video which featured a baby dancing to Prince’s ‘Let’s Go Crazy’, the court said that rights holders “must consider fair use before sending a takedown notification”.
To what extent fair use should be considered was left in some doubt though, with the court also saying that the consideration “need not be searching or intensive” and “does not require investigation of the allegedly infringing content”.
Whether there would be a case for saying that Sony Music had not done enough before taking down the lecture by Fisher – an advocate of major copyright reform – isn’t clear. Retracting the notice after 24 hours may be enough. But it does show that the system is still far from perfect.
