A group of media companies and sports leagues, including NBC Universal, have been accused of threatening consumers by overstating the impact of their copyrights.
An alliance of computer and communication companies, including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, last week complained about the practice to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) of a “systematic misrepresentation of consumers’ rights to use legally acquired content.”
The accused include the National Football League, Major League Baseball, NBC and Universal Studios, DreamWorks, and Harcourt and Penguin Group. The complaint alleges that the warnings displayed by these companies may intimidate consumers from making legal use of copyrighted material.
“It is an attempt to convince Americans that they don’t have rights that they do in fact have,” Ed Black, the association’s president and chief executive, told the “New York Times.” “This is part of the larger context of what should be and what are proper rules for copyright in an Internet age.”
The group wants the FTC to take remedial actions against the content owners including the display of accurate — not exaggerated — copyright warnings.
Julie E. Cohen, a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center who specializes in copyright law, told the newspaper that the fair use doctrine of copyright law establishes a broad standard for how consumers can use copyrighted content, including for purposes of criticism and commentary.
“What fair use is designed to do is create some breathing room,” Cohen told the “Times.” She said fair use could, for example, involve compiling and analyzing copyrighted visual images to create a visual search engine, transferring a song from a CD to an MP3 player or compiling film clips to create a multimedia presentation for a school assignment.
