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Illegitimate or simply unnecessary copyright claims are, unfortunately, commonplace in the Internet era. But if there's one person who's probably not going to back down from a claim of copyright infringement, it's probably Larry Lessig, one of the foremost writers and thinkers on digital-age copyright. Lessig has been advocating for reforms to copyright for many years now.If Liberation Music was thinking they'd have an easy go of it when they demanded that YouTube take down a 2010 lecture of Lessig's entitled "Open," they were mistaken. Lessig has teamed up with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to sue Liberation, claiming that its overly aggressive takedown violates the DMCA and that it should be made to pay damages.Liberation Music owns the exclusive license to "Lisztomania" by the French band Phoenix, and snippets of that song featured prominently in Lessig's lecture. According to the complaint, Lessig showed clips of different groups of amateurs dancing to the song in Brazil, Israel, Brooklyn, Latvia, and Kenya. His point was such spontaneous outbreaks of online culture are "the latest in the time-honored 'call and response' tradition of communication."The lecture was from 2010, but Lessig posted it in June of this year.Lessig's lawsuit runs through the checklist of fair use, making a case for why his lecture is obviously falls under that distinction: he used a small proportion of the song, his lecture doesn't compete with the market for the song in any way, and his lecture is an entirely new creation. Phoenix wanted its song to entertain and make money; Lessig's lecture was educational, and neither he nor Creative Commons, the sponsor, made any profit.The EFF and Lessig are hoping Liberation Music will have to pay damages under 512(f), the section of the DMCA that requires copyright owners to pay damages when they go too far in issuing a takedown. Hardly any copyright owner has ever had to pay damages under 512(f). The EFF's one lawsuit in this area has been the incredibly long-lasting Lenz v. Universal "dancing baby" lawsuit. That case, filed in 2007, is just now lumbering towards an appeal court, and EFF has seen mixed results in that case.The foundation is hoping for a better outcome here. Universal immediately backed down over the Lenz video, but still got slapped with an EFF lawsuit. Liberation, by contrast, threatened Lessig with a suit and forced him to keep his video offline."I have the opportunity, with the help of EFF, to challenge this particular attack," said Lessig in a press release. "I am hopeful the precedent this case will set will help others avoid such a need to fight."
