The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Wired Campus

March 13, 2007

A Professor Attempts a Goal-Line Stand

In honor of Viacom’s much-publicized decision to sue Google for a whopping $1-billion in “massive intentional copyright infringement” damages, we thought we’d provide an update on a rather less lucrative YouTube copyright saga.

Last month Wendy Seltzer, a visiting assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School, was slapped with a DMCA takedown notice after she posted a snippet of the NFL’s standard copyright warning, taken from this year’s Super Bowl, on YouTube (The Chronicle, February 16). When last we checked in, Ms. Seltzer had sent a counternotification to the Web site, arguing that the clip was protected by fair-use doctrine and should be reinstated.

As it turns out, YouTube read Ms. Seltzer’s counternotification and decided she had a point: The site told her it would reinstate the clip. A week later, though, the video has already been taken back offline because of a copyright-infringement claim by the National Football League, according to YouTube. Copyright law, it seems, is nothing if not a back-and-forth game. —Brock Read

Posted on Tuesday March 13, 2007 | Permalink |

Comments

  1. The one lawyer in a small town was starving, so he advertised for another one. Once they both were there, they both got rich. — Legend, not authenticated fact, so too bad Wendy. Keep up the fair use fight…

    — Bill Skocpol    Mar 14, 08:49 AM    #

  2. Fight the good fight! Yay Wendy!

    — Matthew Hall    Mar 14, 09:23 AM    #

  3. Indeed! Keep it up. Shouldn’t there be a legal fund for her? Many of us would contribute, I’m sure…

    — Dan    Mar 14, 05:49 PM    #

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