Lenz v. Universal Music Corp.
In 2007, Stephanie Lenz posted a video on YouTube of her children dancing to "Lets Go Crazy" by Prince, for which YouTube was issued a takedown order by Universal Music Corporation, who owned the copyright to that song. Lenz got YouTube to put it back up, then sued Universal for misrepresentation of the DMCA, which requires the copyright holder to consider whether a potentially-infringing work is protected by fair use. Prince and Universal then set out to remove all Prince from the internet, but Lenz got in the way again. The court ruled in favor of the plaintiff, maintaining that the holder of a copyright is obligated to investigate fair use before issuing any takedowns/C&Ds/etc. according to the DMCA.
This makes it sound like it's illegal to send out a bogus C&D, and under ordinary circumstances I think that would be the case. However, in order to qualify for misrepresentation, a false statement of fact has to be directed at the people you're going after. And NCsoft's lawyers knew this. What they did was send a nastygram not to SEGS, but to the ISP that was hosting the website, saying such things as "your network may be involved in distribution of our copyrighted content" and "distributing copyrighted content is a serious crime," etc. The notice was aimed at scaring the ISP into action, who in turn took the message to the SEGS guys.
I can't say whether or not NCsoft specifically broke the law, but I can say that a company doesn't pay the high price of a legal team just to have them break the law. I think it's more likely that NCsoft was just being slimy, and I don't have any reason to believe they're less inclined now to do the same given the opportunity.
Yeah.
But even in the case above, they didnt send the stuff to the person directly, who sued them but to Youtube.
In NCSoft case sound like they usually send the C&D to the ISP instead of again directly to the person. From what I gather, is usually standard procedure for most companies for some reason. I guess it's scarier when ya get message from the likes of the ISP or Youtube or Facebook in some cases I heard, that is saying, "hey bub, we have a problem. This company over here is trying to sue you if you dont knock it off. I dont want anything to do with it so it would behoove you to just take quit so we dont have problems." And most people just quit without question.
ANd yeah given their past work, with closing down or rather sending C&D to private servers of their past closed games, they probably will do the same to ones they find of the COX nature.
Which still leaves the fact, that if it's legal, why just roll over? I mean people wasnt willing to "roll over" when the game closed? Why roll over when it's a "perfectly legal action" to run a private server of a game? See Lenz questioned it, and won. If she just would have rolled over like so many, then sure I'm sure Universal, which is far bigger than NCSoft, would have kept doing what they did to Lenz. And when I mean question I dont mean just write posts about it, I mean doing something. I mean if private servers as been said many times, is not illegal is not copyright infringement, is not trademark infringement or the likes, then what is the worry? If they send C&D and it is actually fair use, then sue them and keep it moving. There seem to be a lot of worry and fret and secrect talk about something that is one hand said to be perfectly legal and ncsoft cant do anything, but the actions is like they are committing an actual crime. It dont match up. If it's legal, then there is nothing at all to worry about. Either people really dont believe it's perfectly legal and fronting, or it is indeed legal and they are just acting scary for no reason at all.
Which boils down to one simple question.
Is it legal or not?
Yea or nay.
Speaking of which, isnt SEGS at it again anyways?
