Lawrence Lessig - professor and author of several readings for this class - sued Liberation Media, the Australian music label that owns the rights to French band Phoenix' song “Lisztomania," and won! Here is the story, via Ars Technica:
Last summer, Liberation had a video of one of Lessig's lectures (called "Open," which is embedded above) taken down when the company found that he had used video clips with Phoenix's music in it. Lessig, in collaboration with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, challenged the takedown and sued Liberation, arguing that he was well within his right to use Phoenix's music under fair use policies. (Phoenix, for its part, wrote that it was happy to have its music remixed under fair use principles.)
Lessig teamed up with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to extract damages from Liberation under the DMCA's section 512(f), which requires copyright holders to pay damages if they overstep their bounds in issuing a takedown. As Ars noted last summer, hardly any copyright holders have ever had to pay damages under 512(f).
Lessig's and EFF's original complaint against Liberation ran down a long list of reasons why the Phoenix clips in Lessig's lecture should be considered fair use. Ars wrote at the time: “[Lessig] used a small proportion of the song, his lecture doesn't compete with the market for the song in any way, and the lecture is an entirely new creation. Phoenix wanted its song to entertain and make money; Lessig's lecture was educational, and neither he nor Creative Commons, the sponsor, made any profit."What is the significance of this ruling? Hopefully music labels will think twice before being over zealous in their take-down requests.
