Posted on 07/28/2019 2:18:26 PM PDT by ransomnote
A bi-partisan bill working its way through Congress could drastically change how copyright claims are processed, and would create a system to impose up to $30,000 in fines on anyone who shares protected material online.
In other words, the Congress wants to make it easier to sue people who send a meme or post images that they didn’t create themselves, essentially a giveaway to lawyers who sue unsuspecting suckers for a living.
The Senate Judiciary Committee last week approved the “Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act of 2019,” which “creates a voluntary small claims board within the Copyright Office that will provide copyright owners with an alternative to the expensive process of bringing copyright claims, including infringement and misrepresentation …. in federal court,” according to the Copyright Alliance.
“This new board, called the Copyright Claims Board (CCB), would allow recovery in each case of up to $30,000 in damages total, with a cap of $15,000 in statutory damages per work infringed,” according to the alliance, an advocacy group for the copyright industry.
Critics contend the CCB created would essentially provide a way for copyright trolls to target individuals or small businesses to secure five-figure default judgements for innocent mistakes. Put another way, someone who shares memes they didn’t make could be on the hook for $30,000 in fines from folks who make a living from copyright lawsuits.
A petition on ActionNetwork.org opposing the CASE Act explains:
Have you ever shared a meme that you didn’t make? Or downloaded a photo you saw on social media? If Congress has its way you could soon get slapped with a $15,000 fine by copyright trolls – with no chance of appeal – just for doing normal stuff on the internet.
These trolls buy up copyrights with the sole intent of sending out mass threats and lawsuits to harvest settlements. Now, a dangerous new bill called the Copyright Alternative in Small Claims Enforcement Act is sailing through Congress to make it easier for everyone from trolls to Hollywood producers to sue you. …
In recent years, federal courts have made it easier for regular people to defend themselves from frivolous lawsuits by trolls. But the CASE Act would create a separate, industry-friendly system for copyright claims to $30,000, with no option of appeal.
15 ‘‘§ 1504. Nature of proceedings
16 ‘‘(a) VOLUNTARY PARTICIPATION.—Participation in
17 a Copyright Claims Board proceeding shall be on a vol
18 untary basis in accordance with this chapter and the right
19 of any party to instead pursue a claim, counterclaim, or
20 defense in a district court of the United States or any
21 other court, and to seek a jury trial, shall be preserved.
- https://copyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Senate-CASE.pdf
Sounds like censorship, Damm the 1st amendment controlled data exchange ahead!
Golly... I thought “memes” were slang for prophylactics... So just reading the title, I was going to rush out and buy stock in the manufacturers’ companies...
A copyright protected meme? Surely you jest.
Wait a minute. We are constantly told that the natural idea of the Internet is that what appears there is no longer private, that everything there is public and open.
The law is wrong. Those wishing to protect ideas and images have technological solutions. Text itself can be put in an image, and displayed only by displaying the image. Text in an image cannot be extracted and made separate unless high end photoshopping tools are used, or the reader merely types all the words themselves.
And any image can have a “watermark” image embedded in it, providing owner identification of the image. Even “memes” can be created this way.
There are solutions. They are all technical and do not need the law.
Really?
I can use SnagIt, a very inexpensive piece of software to copy any image because it simply grabs the bits going to my display adapter.
Even a screen grab does that.
Snagit, (1) though it has free trials, is, at a technical level “high end” and (2) the vast majority of people (a) do not know about Snagit and (b) are not going to go looking for it. Thus, in most cases, a water-marked image is not author/creator compromised, the number of cases it is compromised will be reduced, and the total cost of legal remediation resolving the much fewer CIVIL cases makes pursuing them more likely.
Creators/authors KNOW their ownership WILL BE compromised. The main thing is to reduce that. They can do that with technology, they don’t need new laws making criminals.
Well, watermarks are a whole other thing.
Snagit or screengrabs will get the water mark, too. But you knew I knew that, right? :-)
“Snagit or screengrabs will get the water mark, too. But you knew I knew that, right? :-)”
Yes. But most folks are either ignorant of such tools or don’t think its worth their time to make the effort. So, watermarks are a like a fence most people won’t climb over. They protect as well as fence does. Civil suits can take care of the fence climbers because if they are going to be fence climbers, the laws are NOT GOING TO STOP THEM ANYWAY and law enforcement has more important things to do, when civil judgements are just as good a remedy.
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