From the damned-if-you-do department…
Techdirt is discussing the very strange lawsuit against text-sharing site Scribd. The strangest part of this particular lawsuit involves Scribd’s copyright protection measures. Because Scribd has to have a copy of the work at some point and in some form in order to make sure that the infringing file can’t be uploaded for public viewing, the lawsuit is apparently claiming that their protection itself violates copyright.
If Scribd is found infringing in this manner, the decision has some potentially far-reaching implications for the implementation of copy protection technologies, and (following the money) the businesses that create such technologies.
drl said,
September 23, 2009 @ 3:59 pm
As I understand it, their copyright protection measures involve having a copy of the protected work to check against new files that arrive. Copies get into the database either by content owners giving them a copy or making a copy for the database when they get a complaint about a file already on the public accessible side.
The charge, then, is that the copy in the database for checking is an unauthorized copy. Lots of weird thinking there. But, to me, this looks a lot like the Turnitin.com case and there is a good fair use case to be made for the creating and storing the unauthorized copy.