Recent Internet Copyright Cases Verily Frustrate Content Businesses in New York and Elsewhere
Recently, Al Gore, best known for calling out Inconvenient Truths, won a court case spelling that called out yet another inconvenient truth: that for better of worse, chasing down copyright infringement on the Net is abysmally fruitless for copyright holders. Gore’s Current TV was sued for use of a photograph by Ken R. Light on its web site without authorization.
Rather than deny the use, Current TV made the “it’s just an internet thing” argument to overturn a small claims court judgment in Light’s favor. This is remarkable given the fact the small court judgment was for a mere $588. And given the media juggernaut the Gore name has become (one could argue that losing the presidency was the best thing for his brand), this is an absurd result.
You can read more about that case and the reaction of novelist and New York Times contributor Scott James here. His column decries what appears to be a complete disintegration of legal and professional courtesy (attribution chief among these). Moreover while his arguments are largely qualitative, there is increasing quantitative evidence that copyright litigation is declining, presumably because so much infringement conduct is net driven.
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