Legal News

A Copyright Head-Scratcher, Courtesy of Kiwi Camara

By Ashby Jones

Here we go again: yet another situation in which folks are trying to push a the square peg of the law into technology’s round hole. Such struggles can lead to some head-scratching, but usually make for some pretty good entertainment.

This tale comes courtesy of the WSJ’s Geoffrey Fowler, writing in this week’s Law Journal column. The debate, as he puts it, is “raging in Silicon Valley over whether copyright law protects companies who make filters that screen for — of all things — copyright theft.”

The controversy revolves around a suit, filed last month by author Elaine Scott against Scribd.com, a Web site that allows people to publish their own books and documents online and share them with others.

After a user of the site posted without Scott’s permission a copy of one of her books, she notified the site, and asked that it remove the book. Scribd obliged, but in the suit, Scott claims Scribd didn’t do enough to protect her copyright in the first place.

On the perhaps the most obvious copyright issue issue, Scott had an uphill battle: Courts have ruled several times that Web sites can’t be held accountable when users post stolen material.

But a second claim in Scott’s suit adds a wrinkle. Scribd created filtering software to prevent books it knows are stolen from being posted again. Every time an author asks Scribd to remove copyrighted work, the company automatically adds that work to its filter. Scott claims that Scribd doesn’t have the right to use her book in its filter — even if it claims to be doing so to protect her interests.

“Scribd doesn’t have the authority to ‘help’ me with anything,” said Scott in an email. “The filtering system is Scribd’s way of asking for forgiveness, rather than permission.”

An attorney for Scribd, Wilson Sonsini’s Brian Mendonca, countered that Scott’s lawsuit is without merit because the site’s filtering system “doesn’t exploit the filtered works for commercial purposes and isn’t replacing or diminishing the value of the filtered works.” A Scribd spokeswoman said the company has never sold its filtering system and has no plans to do so.

But Scott’s attorney, Kiwi Camara, says Scribd could sell its system to other sites that want to filter for stolen work. “They are building up a valuable asset that nobody else is going to have by taking work from authors without sharing with them the profits,” said Camara.

Of course, making the suit even more intriguing is the presence of Camara himself. The 25-year-old lawyer, who finished Harvard Law School at age 19, recently represented Jammie Thomas, a Minnesota woman who was ordered in June to cough up $1.92 million as a penalty for downloading 24 songs. Back in 2002, while still at Harvard, Camara got himself embroiled in a strange little controversy involving use of the “N-word” in a course outline.

In our opinion, the story on the controversy is worth a read, if only to read Camara’s rather odd explanation for why he did what he did. Click here for the story from the Harvard Law Record.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on October 01, 2009 (boomark / email).