Jammie Thomas Requests New Trial → Re: She's not arguing she's innocent any more!

Here we go again.

I suggest you read up on the Berne Convention and the removal of the required copyright symbol, which has led to cases of the damage amount being reduced because the infringer wasn't aware the work was copyrighted. This has in turn prompted copyright holders to seek out infringers and bring them to trial under civil law for facing what is essentially an invalid copyright. If no one knows your work is copyrighted and you don't attempt to enforce that copyright, the court can deem it is not enforceable.

I am not a copyright lawyer, but this is fairly common knowledge if you have researched these issues at all.


(5) Innocent violations. —

(A) In general. — The court in its discretion may reduce or remit the total award of damages in any case in which the violator sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that the violator was not aware and had no reason to believe that its acts constituted a violation.

I'm not a copyright lawyer either, but:

you said:
"Copyright holders HAVE to enforce their copyrights (and trademarks) or they could be invalidated."

I said:
"copyright holders do not have to enforce their copyrights or they are invalidated"

you certainly dig deep by referencing the berne convention, but your reference addresses whether or not there was a copyright notice on the infringed work; if the work did not have a copyright mark and the rights holder cannot prove the infringer had knowledge the work was copyrighted, the court can "reduce or remit" damages - the rights holder's copyright is not invalidated, he just doesn't get the big payday he was hoping for.

US copyright has the same kind of "innocent infringement":

An innocent infringer is someone who has authored a work which infringes a prior protected work, but where the author did not realize he was infringing the protected work. This innocence is only a valid defense to a claim of copyright infringement if the original protected work did not include a copyright notice.

In this case, statutory damages are reduced to a specific amount ($200/per).

In fact, last year a case was ruled this way:

"A judge has ruled that a teenage girl who admitted to downloading music over KaZaA will only have to pay damages of $200 per song, instead of the $750-30,000 normally allowed under the Copyright Act (and the $750 per song sought by the RIAA). The reason for the cap comes from Whitney Harper's "innocent infringement" defense, in which she argues that she did not knowingly infringe the record labels' copyright. "

this isn't invalidating a copyright. with trademarks, you WILL lose your trademark if you fail to police it.

I'm not aware there is any way to lose a copyright, except when the period of copyright has passed. since that period is now a ridiculous "life of the author + 70 years" and will probably be extended again when a copyright owned by a big corporation is about to expire (see Mouse, Mickey or Eldred v. Ashcroft), copyrights are effectively "forever" in the U.S.

"I'm not aware there is any way to lose a copyright..."

As I understand it, if a company owns the rights to a fixed work and then goes out of business without a transfer of ownership to another party, the work in question instantly goes into public domain. This is why you see so many recent movies (within the last twenty or thirty years) that end up on DVDs in the dollar store under distributed by a ton of different companies. I know one or two IP lawyers sometimes haunt these discussions and if they'd like to chime in with a clarification, that'd be great.

Here's a site that gives more info on such titles:

»www.openflix.com/

I'd be willing to look at any contrary cases or evidence, but I'm fairly certain that your understanding isn't quite correct.

It's not generally possible to simply lose your copyright to a work, unless it's been forfeited by unintentionally failing to comply with the conditions for federal copyright protection in effect at the time. But, that is very timeframe and law specific. Dissolution of a corporation doesn't necessarily equate to abandonment.

Now, whether a company that has gone defunct even cares about enforcing its copyrights is a different matter.

Edit: You can also expressly try to abandon your copyright in a work, but you have to make some kind of overt act displaying your intention to abandon the copyright.