EFFector Vol. 14, No. 14 July 16, 2001 editor@eff.org
A Publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation ISSN 1062-9424
EFFector Vol. 14, No. 14 July 16, 2001 editor@eff.org
A Publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation ISSN 1062-9424
For more information on EFF activities & alerts: http://www.eff.org
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Cindy Cohn, EFF Legal Dir.,
cindy@eff.org,
+1 415 436 9333 x108
Will Doherty, EFF Online Activist / Media Relations,
wild@eff.org,
+1 415 436 9333 x111
New York - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today urged a New York state court to respect Mexican court rulings that have disallowed lawsuits against independent journalist Al Giordano for publishing allegations of drug trafficking by Banco Nacional de Mexico President Roberto Hernandez Ramirez.
EFF seeks to protect the First Amendment rights of online,
independent journalists against the abusive "shopping" by
large, powerful corporations for favorable jurisdictions.
The Mexican bank brought the case against a Mexican-based
website, produced solely by Giordano, the Narco News Bulletin:
http://www.narconews.com/.
"The EFF is concerned that the bank resorted to New York courts to try to shut down this website because it could not do so in Mexican courts," said Cindy Cohn, Legal Director for the EFF. "This kind of forum shopping threatens to shut down one of the greatest benefits of the Internet -- giving a voice to independent, Internet-based journalists. Faced with having to defend themselves in far-flung jurisdictions, many independent journalists will simply choose not to publish on the Internet."
The case arises from allegations published on the the Narco News Bulletin website that the bank president was involved in illegal activities in Mexico. The EFF filed an amicus brief urging the New York court to rule that it was improper for the bank to force Mr. Giordano into New York state court for the statements posted on the website. The hearing on the case is set for July 20, 2001.
Since April 18, 2000, Al Giordano has produced the Narco News Bulletin, an online newspaper devoted to spirited investigative journalism on the US-Latin America drug trade. Articles posted on the Narco News Bulletin website have discussed allegations by others that Roberto Hernandez Ramirez, the president of the Banco Nacional de Mexico, is involved in drug trafficking. Some of these stories were reprinted articles from the Mexican newspaper Por Esto!, published in Mexico by Mario Renato Menendez.
After failing three times to successfully sue Menendez in Mexico over the allegations, Banco Nacional de Mexico now seeks to force Menendez and Giordano to defend themselves in New York state court against the same basic claims. The New York case groups together the allegations against the Mexican-based website, hosted in Maryland, with statements made by Menendez and Giordano in New York City on a radio broadcast and at a Columbia University Law School conference.
The EFF amicus brief asked the Court to adopt one of two courses of action. First, in order to deter abusive forum shopping, the EFF asked the court to dismiss the case since Mexican law governs the dispute.
Alternatively, since Narconews.com mainly republished investigative work done by others, the EFF asked the New York court to apply a distinct legal standard for libel claims related to republished statements. The legal standard requires that a republisher had, or should have had substantial reasons to question the accuracy of the articles. EFF believes that this higher liability standard for republishing on the Internet is necessary to encourage the growth of Internet journalism.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading civil liberties
organization working to protect rights in the digital world. Founded in
1990, EFF actively encourages and challenges industry and government to
support free expression, privacy, and openness in the information
society. EFF is a member-supported organization and maintains one of the
most linked-to Web sites in the world:
http://www.eff.org/
- end -
Allonn Levy, Attorney, HS Law Group,
ael@hsapc.com,
Robin Gross, EFF Staff Attorney,
robin@eff.org,
+1 415 436 9333 x112
San Jose, CA - Debate over whether Indiana student Matthew Pavlovich must appear in a DVD software publication case will continue tomorrow, July 12, in a California court. In December 2000, a unanimous California Supreme Court ruled that the appellate court must reconsider its decision requiring Pavlovich to defend himself in a California court.
The movie industry trade group DVD-CCA continues attempts to force Pavlovich and 500 anonymous posters located all over the world to defend themselves against alleged trade secret misappropriation despite the hardships these alleged web publishers would face in a legal battle fought far from their homes.
"The importance of Constitutional restrictions on the reach of state courts has never been more important than in the Internet age," said Pavlovich's attorney Allonn Levy, of the HS Law Group. "Without the proper application of these safeguards, the Internet will become a liability minefield for users, facing nation-wide legal exposure anytime they publish to the Internet, dramatically chilling speech on the Web," explained the San Jose litigator.
"The US Constitution's due process clause guarantees that you will not be sued in Santa Clara, California, 2000 miles away from the Indiana student dormitory where you surf the web," stated Robin Gross, EFF staff attorney for intellectual property and Pavlovich's co-counsel.
In December 1999, DVD-CCA sued hundreds of individuals, including Indiana college student Matthew Pavlovich, for allegedly publishing DeCSS software on a website that hosted various Linux-based open-source projects.
The movie industry, represented by its trade group DVD-CCA, filed the lawsuit in California alleging trade secret misappropriation. The suit attempts to force Pavlovich and 500 anonymous posters located all over the world to defend their Internet publication of the software in California.
Trial and appellate courts both denied Pavlovich's motion for dismissal, but in a rare move last December, the California Supreme Court unanimously granted Pavlovich's petition for review and sent the matter back to the appellate court for argument on why the non-California resident with no connection to the state should remain in the case.
The U.S. Constitution's due process clause limits a state court's ability to assert power over out-of-state defendants who have no connection with that state.
DeCSS is free software that allows people to play DVDs without technological restrictions, such as region codes, preferred by movie studios.
At a January 2000 hearing, Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge William Elfving ordered defendants to remove postings of DeCSS pending the case's outcome at trial. The 6th Appellate Circuit court will hear EFF's appeal of Elfving's ruling this fall.
The appeals court has stayed the alleged trade secret misappropriation case pending the outcome of Pavlovich's jurisdictional motion.
The California 6th Appellate Court will hear arguments
on the case on Thursday, July 12th at 9:30 a.m. at
333 W. Santa Clara St., 10th floor, in San Jose,
California. For directions see:
See Pavlovich's appellate motion to dismiss for lack of
jurisdiction:
See DVD-CCA's opposition to original request for dismissal:
EFF's archive on California DeCSS case:
Cryptome archive with more legal filings:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading civil liberties
organization working to protect rights in the digital world. Founded in
1990, EFF actively encourages and challenges industry and government to
support free expression, privacy, and openness in the information
society. EFF is a member-supported organization and maintains one of the
most linked-to Web sites in the world:
http://www.eff.org/
- end -
July 6, 2001
VIA E-MAIL, FACSIMILE and REGULAR MAIL
Matthew Carlin
Gibney, Anthony & Flaherty, LLP
665 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10022
Telephone: 212.688.5151
Fax: 212.688.8315
Re: Trademark Infringement Claim based upon Barney Parody
Dear Mr. Carlin,
I am the Legal Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). As you may know, the EFF is the leading online civil liberties organization in the world. For the past eleven years we have worked ceaselessly to ensure that constitutional and human rights, including the First Amendment rights of Americans, are respected online.
We are in receipt of your e-mail dated June 6, 2001, concerning the presence of a parody of Barney on the EFF's website, as part of the archives of an online magazine and archive project called Computer underground Digest (CuD) that EFF hosted until recently.
At the outset, you should note that the EFF no longer hosts the CuD archive, so the material you mentioned is no longer on our website. This transfer was part of a longstanding arrangement EFF had with the official archivists for CuD and has nothing whatsoever to do with your threats. Thus, there is no basis for any further action by you against the EFF.
Nonetheless, since we have been alarmed at the number of similarly baseless threat letters that have been sent by your firm and others under the guise of trademark and copyright protection, we will address the substantive allegations contained in your letter. We will also be publicizing our response, so that others who receive similar letters from you can have the benefit of our legal analysis.
In fact, your letter comes at an opportune time. The EFF is in the process of developing a "Chilling Effects Clearinghouse" in conjunction with the legal clinics of several major law schools. The purpose is to create a place where recipients of cease and desist letters such as yours can go to get basic information to assist them in responding. It is also to create a "hall of shame" for lawyers and law firms that send out letters that make broad, unfounded and simply wrong claims about what is required under copyright and trademark law. We expect that your letter will be a prime example for use in the project, which we plan to launch in the coming months.
As you should know, the CuD archive is a free archive of online magazines. CuD has no commercial purpose, nor did EFF's hosting of the archive. The article to which you object is a blatant, unvarnished parody of Barney, including revised words to the song used in the Barney show (which itself appears to be derivative of the children's song "This Old Man"). The parody is clear and presents no likelihood that anyone would confuse it with the original character or song lyrics.
Your letter claims that the EFF website "incorporates the use and threat of violence toward the children's character Barney." But your distaste for the material, even when strangely phrased as a "threat of violence" against an imaginary character, is plainly not the correct standard for legal liability under either trademark or copyright law. To the contrary, as a California federal court recently observed:
The fact that plaintiff views the song as 'attacking' the wholesome image of its product bolsters defendants' arguments that this song involves a parody, therefore raising First Amendment concerns. See Dr. Suess Enterprises, L.P., v. Penguin Books USA, Inc., 109 F.3d 1394 at 1400 (observing that parody is a form of social and literary criticism" implicating free speech interests under the First Amendment).
Mattel, Inc. v. MCA Records, Inc., 1998 U.S. Dist., LEXIS 7310 (C.D. Cal., 1998)(song "Barbie Girl" is a parody). Your letter contains two legal claims, neither of which is defensible under existing law.
First, you contend that the Barney parody constitutes trademark infringement under federal law. Of course, trademark infringement requires that the contested use give rise to a likelihood of consumer confusion. I think you'll agree that there is no plausible likelihood that anyone could conclude that the parody was created by, or endorsed by, your clients, and thus no possibility of consumer confusion.
Perhaps recognizing the futility of a trademark infringement claim, you contend that the Barney parody constitutes trademark dilution in violation of the Federal Trademark Dilution Act, 15 U.S.C. §1125(c)(1). It appears that, in preparing your letter, you failed to consider the rest of that section of the statute, specifically 15 U.S.C. § 1125(c)(4), which provides:
(4) The following shall not be actionable under this section:
(C) Noncommercial use of the mark.
Here, both EFF, as the host for the archive, and the CuD archive itself, have a noncommercial purpose. There is no basis for a federal dilution claim against EFF, CuD or anyone else who presents this parody in a noncommercial context.
Even if the Barney parody did fall within the Federal Trademark Dilution Act, the First Amendment would prevent its application here. In L.L. Bean, Inc. v. Drake Publishers, 811 F.2d 26, 33 (1st Cir. 1987), the court held that the First Amendment is a complete shield from liability for noncommercial uses of marks in artistic or editorial contexts. That case concerned an adult magazine's parody of the L.L. Bean outdoorwear catalog. Here, we have an online magazine's noncommercial parody of your clients' character. As in the L.L. Bean case, the First Amendment properly shields EFF and others from legal liability in connection with the expressive, noncommercial parody of the Barney character.
Second, you claim that EFF's "actions constitute direct copyright infringement." You fail to identify which of our actions constitutes copyright infringement. As you should know, the name "Barney" cannot be protected under copyright law.
We can only guess that you claim a violation based upon a copyright in the lyrics to the Barney song. If so, then, it seems you have failed to review the standards for fair use parody under 17 U.S.C. §107 as interpreted by the Supreme Court in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Publishing 510 U.S. 569 (1994). As you may recall, this case concerned a parody of the Roy Orbison song "Oh Pretty Woman," done by a rap group, 2 Live Crew. Because 2 Live Crew had used Mr. Orbison's song in order to lampoon Mr. Orbison and his genre of music, the Supreme Court found the use to fall within the bounds of the fair use doctrine. Similarly, the parody to which you object uses elements of the Barney song in order to criticize Barney. Accordingly, the Supreme Court's analysis in Campbell is directly applicable here.
Here, the use of the Barney lyrics is noncommercial. In case you were wondering, the Supreme Court confirmed that the "character" of the use does not include judicial second guessing about the tastefulness of the use: "Whether . . . parody is in good taste or bad does not and should not matter to fair use."Campbell at 582.
The fact that the Barney song, like "Oh Pretty Woman" in the Campbell case, falls within the heart of copyrighted expression "is not much help in this case, or ever likely to help much in separating the fair use sheep from the infringing goats in a parody case, since parodies almost invariably copy publicly known, expressive works."Campbell at 586.
Here, it appears that portions of the "Barney" song that have been used are the general cadence and the phrase "I hate Barney, Barney hates me" and variations thereof, which are direct parodies of "I love you, you love me" in the Barney song. Again, the Supreme Court has clarified:
Parody's humor, or in any event its comment, necessarily springs from recognizable allusion to its object through distorted imitation. Its art lies in the tension between a known original and its parodic twin. When parody takes aim at a particular original work, the parody must be able to "conjure up" at least enough of that original to make the object of its critical wit recognizable. See, e.g., Elsmere Music, 623 F.2d, at 253, n. 1; Fisher v. Dees, 794 F.2d, at 438-439.
Campbell at 588. Here, the parody similarly "conjures up" enough of the original to be understood as a parody.
It seems highly unlikely that you will be able to prove even a small effect on the market for Barney products based upon this parody. But even if you could, the fact that a parody might hurt the market for the parodied work is immaterial for purposes of fair use analysis:
[W]e do not, of course, suggest that a parody may not harm the market at all, but when a lethal parody, like a scathing theater review, kills demand for the original, it does not produce a harm cognizable under the Copyright Act. Because "parody may quite legitimately aim at garroting the original, destroying it commercially as well as artistically," B. Kaplan, An Unhurried View of Copyright 69 (1967), the role of the courts is to distinguish between "[b]iting criticism [that merely] suppresses demand [and] copyright infringement[, which] usurps it." Fisher v. Dees, 794 F.2d, at 438.
Campbell at 592. It seems highly unlikely that you could prove that this parody "usurps" any demand for the Barney song.
***
Thus, whether analyzed as a matter of trademark dilution or copyright infringement, your claims are baseless. We therefore urge you to cease sending out similar letters to the other noncommercial hosts of this material.
Finally, we would like to remind you that New York State Code of Professional Responsibility DR 7-102 [§1200.33] and Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11 provides for sanctions for litigation undertaken without support in existing law or sufficient evidentiary support. You may rest assured that, should you pursue a legal course of action against the EFF based upon the frivolous claims made in your e-mail, we will both defend against your claims with all of the means at are disposal and will seek appropriate affirmative relief.
Please do not hesitate to contact me with any further questions or concerns.
Sincerely,
Cindy A. Cohn
EFFector is published by:
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Katina Bishop, EFF Education & Offline Activism Director
Stanton McCandlish, EFF Technical Director/Webmaster
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