Tuesday, March 09, 2010

Partial summary judgment motions made in Viacom v YouTube, documents under seal

In Viacom v. YouTube , the parties are making partial summary judgment motions on the applicability of the DMCA to YouTube.

The Court has initially permitted the parties to file their documents under seal.

[Ed. note. I find it disturbing that the papers are permitted to be filed under seal. Whatever happened to "courts of record"? There is too much of this going on, and it always seems to be in RIAA/MPAA cases. It used to be virtually impossible to get things filed under seal; now it seems to be a routine matter. Now that we finally have the technology to know and share what is really going on in our courts, the parties and/or the courts seem bound and determined to take that away from us. I sincerely hope that the media who have money for such things protest. -R.B.]




Commentary & discussion:

p2pnet.net

Keywords: lawyer digital copyright law online internet law legal download upload peer to peer p2p file sharing filesharing music movies indie independent label freeculture creative commons pop/rock artists riaa independent mp3 cd favorite songs intellectual property portable music player

7 comments:

mathinker said...

Considering the way ACTA is being negotiated, I wonder if it might not include special provisions making it easier for copyright/trademark/patent/etc. violation trials be held behind closed doors.

Anonymous said...

Anyone else find these actions to be extremely fishy. In the state of Florida there is legislation going through right now banning the public release of 911 tapes. Like the above mentions case this will cause problems because then there is no oversight of the agencies involved. If mistakes are made they will never come to light because only the involved parties are able to see the documents.

cbcalvin said...

Unsealed today? http://www.betanews.com/article/Will-Viacoms-public-airing-of-YouTubes-dirty-laundry-change-the-Web-forever/1269029872

Alter_Fritz said...

well, it seems at least google/yt has made their march 11th, 108 page memorandum public at http://www.google.com/press/pdf/20100318_google_viacom_youtube_memorandum.pdf

found via http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/03/broadcast-yourself.html

so far I have nothing found from plaintiffs

HTH
A_F

raybeckerman said...

My deep apologies. I have the briefs, forgot to post them. Will upload them tomorrow.

Will not be uploading the affidavits; too voluminous.

Anonymous said...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like from what Google is saying is that Viacom and the other plaintiffs used the DMCA notices improperly and Google has declarations from the plaintiffs to back it up (from parts scattered throughout the first 15 or so pages).

-me

Anonymous said...

It should probably be noted that, in this particular case, Viacom has been fighting to make everything public. It is Google that keeps moving for sealing. Google actually moved to keep all of the documents sealed indefinitely. They really don't want any algorithms public and they really, really don't want the comments they made in emails made public.