Chicago Business Litigation Lawyer Blog
Not all companies are sure how to apply their business practices to the Digital Age. Since most people running some of the larger, more established companies came of age in a pre-internet era, many of them are understandably stumped by what laws and rules apply to which online situations (although admittedly a lot of younger viewers aren’t sure about the rules of social media either).
The situation has improved over the years as everyone has adjusted to the new technologies, but the early part of the new century was an especially trying time for companies and individuals alike.
Take Stephanie Lenz for example. She took a video of her infant son dancing to the song, “Let’s Go Crazy,” by Prince, and then uploaded it to the internet where anyone could see it – without asking permission or paying for the use of a song to which she did not own the rights. That seemingly harmless act resulted in a copyright lawsuit that dragged on for more than ten years.
Universal Musical Publishing Group (UMPG), which owns the rights to the recordings of Prince’s songs, issued an order under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for Lenz to take down the video.
Lenz initially complied with the order, but then she contacted the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an international non-profit group that works to protect people’s rights online. The company is based in San Francisco and argued that UMPG had ignored the fair-use exception to the copyright law when it ordered Lenz to take down the video. Continue reading ›