Austrian Courts Uphold Creative Commons License Terms -- For Now
from the but-it's-not-over-yet dept
Last week, Mike wrote about an important case involving one of the Creative Commons licenses. The fact that some 15 years after the CC movement started and the courts are still trying to bring legal clarity to the use of CC licenses is further proof that the law tends to lag far behind technology. Given their rarity, it's interesting to see another recent case involving a CC license, this time in Austria, pointed out by Alan Toner on his blog.
As the timeline (in German) of the events indicates, the story began in January 2014, when thousands of left-wing protesters demonstrated against a ball organized by the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), held annually in Vienna. Following attacks on property and the police during the protest, one person was arrested, and in June 2014 his trial began.
The left-wing film collective Filmpiraten published a couple of short videos relating to the person involved. Shortly afterwards, the FPÖ used excerpts from the two Filmpiraten videos as part of a report published on its YouTube channel. The FPÖ video was released under the standard YouTube license, which claims full copyright in the material. However, both the Filmpiraten videos used a Creative Commons license -- specifically, the BY-NC-SA license. Under its terms, others may use the material free of charge, but are required to release the resulting work under the same CC license.
The FPÖ video did not respect that condition, so Filmpiraten's lawyers sent a letter asking for its material not to be used. The FPÖ responded by taking Filmpiraten to court, demanding €35,000 (about $40,000) in compensation for what it said were false accusations about its use of copyrighted material. The court case finally began in February 2015, and in July 2016 the judge ruled in favor of Filmpiraten, effectively upholding the Creative Commons license.
One worrying aspect of the case is that Filmpiraten struggled to find the resources to conduct such an expensive and time-consuming legal battle. As a spokesperson for the organization told the Austrian site futurezone, that may be why the FPÖ has adopted this approach -- and why it is now appealing to a higher court in an attempt to get the judge's ruling overturned.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: austria, copyfraud, copyright, creative commons, filmpiraten, fpo, freedom party
Companies: filmpiraten, fpo
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Ah good old copyfraud...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
This is my biggest complaint about copyright. Even if you want your work given away, you'll have to sue to ensure that it is, since the bloody monopoly is controlling all of the legal resources. Just look at the case of Carol Highsmith. So far CC and possibly some software licenses, though they are a train wreck in legalize, are the only licenses to permit such situations. Personally, I use usually the beer license and CC attribution for my personal stuff, but hell if someone can make a buck off of my work go to town.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Or take a hint from their German counterpart and doing as did Möllemann.
I mean, don't all politicans want to have an impact of some sort?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Fair use?
I would think that many people would support any group being able to use snippets of other videos as part of a published work such as this report without having to worry about the copyright on the snippets.
No idea if Austria has a fair use equivalent (I know the UK, where I am, doesn't) but I think it is something we should cheer for even if the people using it are reprehensible.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Fair use?
However, once the premise is that any CC license is equivalent to being in the Public Domain, the court does not even get to rule about one of the so-so fair use equivalents.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Fair use?
The core issue here is a fraudulent ownership claim. FPO claimed those video snippets were theirs not the actual owners, and sued the owners to get a court to declare that FPO were the actual owners -- whether by judicial fiat or by running the actual owners into bankruptcy so a default judgment would find in favor of FPO.
Fraudulent claims of copyright ownership are NEVER fair use.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Fair use?
Copyfraud, unlikely copyright infringement is actually an attempt to take something from someone, specifically the ownership of a thing.
'You had it, I claimed to own it, now I have it and you don't'
Perhaps an alternate t-shirt for next round, or a new one could be:
FRONT
'Copying isn't theft...'
BACK
'... but copyfraud can be.'
[ link to this | view in chronology ]