3 Count: Jared Letdown

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1: TMZ Beats Jared Leto’s Lawsuit Over Taylor Swift Video

First off today, Eriq Gardner at The Hollywood Reporter Esquire reports that Jared Leto has suffered a defeat in his lawsuit against TMZ over the video him listening to Taylor Swift’s 1989 album and saying, with explicatives, that he doesn’t care about her.

The video, which was first published by TMZ in December, caused a backlash against Leto, who quickly apologized. However, Leto sued TMZ saying that the videographer was hired by him and that he, without permission, sold the tape to TMZ. To back this up, Leto brought forth a work for hire agreement signed by the videographer after the tape was made.

However, the court ruled that Leto was never the copyright holder and that, for it to be valid, the work for hire agreement would have had to have been made before the work was created, not after. As such Leto was never the owner of the video and merely had a license to use it, causing the court to toss the case. However, the case may be ripe for appeal as other circuits have disagreed on the timing of the work for hire notice.

2: Court: Uploaded Can’t Ignore ‘Spam’ Copyright Notices

Next up today, Ernesto at Torrentfreak writes that the file hosting site Uploaded has suffered a setback in Germany as the court has ruled that it can be held liable for copyright notices that it never saw due to its anti-spam protections.

The lawsuit was filed by the anti-piracy company proMedia GmbH. They claimed to have sent thousands of takedown notices to Uploaded that were ignored. However, Uploaded claimed that they never saw the notices because they were marked as spam by and anti-denial of service tool that filtered out the emails.

However, the Higher Regional Court of Hamburg has upheld a lower court ruling that Uploaded can be held liable for ignoring those notices. Furthermore, since Uploaded willfully put the system into place, that, functionally Uploaded was aware of the infringement and chose to ignore it.

3: Nazi Anthem at the Core of YouTube Copyright Brawl

Finally today, Catalin Cimparu at Softpedia reports that filmmaker James Lambert has been struggling with YouTube to get a documentary he created put back online following a copyright claim on the Nazi anthem, which is played in part of the video.

In 2006 Lambert uploaded a 44-minute documentary entitled You Don’t Know Hitler, which detailed the horrors of the Nazi regime. During a short passage, the song Horst Wessel Lied plays, a song more commonly known as the Nazi anthem. However, this past week the National German Library, through BR Enter Music, filed a copyright claim against the video over the song and ordered it taken down.

According to Lambert, the copyright in the song, along with all Nazi-owned copyrights, became invalid after World War II when both the U.S. and UK ceased recognizing Nazi copyrights. However, he goes on to say that the use of the song was a fair use, even if  it is protected by copyright. But, even with these arguments, Lambert claims he is unable to get the video back online at YouTube due to its unfair copyright system, which hinders counternotices.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

The 3 Count Logo was created by Justin Goff and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.