Facebook and its take on privacy settings have been in the news quite a bit lately.  What is the big deal?  Facebook has created a vast maze of settings which is nearly impossible to navigate on your own.  To avoid feeling like Juan Ponce de León searching for the Fountain of Youth, look to the New York Times infographic which details the location of every facebook privacy setting.  According to this graphic, Facebook’s privacy policy, at 5, 830 words, is the longest of any other social networking site and is even 1,300 words longer than the United States Constitution (without amendments).  If the Supreme Court still hasn’t figured the Constitution out, tell me – how are we supposed to decipher privacy on Facebook?

Why is this important?

I won’t argue that facebook isn’t a great resource for keeping up with friends and old acquaintances and for networking but it can also be fraught with danger.  For one thing, while you can choose which pictures to upload to facebook, you have no control over what others post.  Sure, you can “de-tag” yourself from a picture but you have no way to remove the potentially harmful picture.  To make matters worse, many employers now conduct pre-employment google and facebook searches of potential employees which may lead to trouble getting hired.  Kathy Potter, Director of the Career Center at Santa Clara university says that employers are using “online resources to reject applicants, not to make final hiring decisions.”  To make matters worse, it is very difficult to permanently delete something from Facebook.

Do yourself a favor and do your best to regulate what the internet says about you because you never know what sort of information the “open graph” will learn about you.  Your career will thank you.

Boston Employment Lawyer · career · Facebook · Internet · New Hampshire Employment Lawyer · privacy · Worcester Employment Lawyer

Do you download music from file-sharing or P2P (peer-to-peer) networks? If you do, a recent ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals may make you rethink doing so.

In Arista Records, LLC v. Doe 3, the Second Circuit upheld a district court ruling rejecting the defendants’ request to quash the plaintiff record companies’ (Arista, Atlantic, BMG, Capitol, Elektra, Interscope, Maverick, Motown, Sony BMG, UMG, VIrgin, Warner Bros., and Zomba) subpoena to the defendants’ Internet service provider (ISP) for confidential information which would identify the defendants. The defendants argued, among other things, that the First Amendment’s right to privacy and right to anonymous speech protected them from such disclosure. The Second Circuit disagreed, holding that, when such anonymous use of the Internet involved copyright infringement, the copyright holders’ need for the infringers’ identities to enforce their intellectual property rights outweighed the defendants’ First Amendment right to anonymous Internet use. To paraphrase the court, the First Amendment is not a license to infringe copyrights.

The heart of the Second Circuit’s decision rested on the lower court’s analysis of the plaintiffs’ copyright rights versus the defendants’ First Amendment rights under the five Sony Music Entertainment Inc. v. Does 1-40 (326 F.Supp.2d 556 (S.D.N.Y. 2004) factors:

(1) [the] concrete[ness of the plaintiff's] showing of a prima facie claim of actionable harm, . . . (2) [the] specificity of the discovery request, . . . (3) the absence of alternative means to obtain the subpoenaed information, . . . (4) [the] need for the subpoenaed information to advance the claim, . . . and (5) the [objecting] party’s expectation of privacy.

Sony Music, 326 F. Supp.2d at 564-65.

The defendants argued that the plaintiffs did not make a sufficiently particularized showing in order to overcome the defendants’ qualified First Amendment privilege. The lower court and the Second Circuit disagreed, given that the plaintiff record companies provided a detailed record of the alleged copyright infringement, as well as specifying exactly what information they sought from the defendants’ ISP, the State University of New York at Albany (SUNYA).

This case touches on many big issues: the First Amendment versus intellectual property rights, the extent of the fair use doctrine, the record companies versus the “little guy.” If anything, Arista Records, LLC v. Doe 3 clarifies exactly what a copyright plaintiff will need to show in order to pierce the First Amendment’s qualified right to anonymous Internet use. It will be interesting to see if this case advances to the Supreme Court.

h/t – Leagle.com

Arista Records · Atlantic Recording Corporation · BMG Music · Boston IP Lawyer · Capitol Records · Copyright Act of 1976 · copyright infringement · Elektra Entertainment Group Inc. · fair use · file sharing · First Amendment · infringement · intellectual property · Internet · Internet service provider · Interscope Records · ISPs · law · Leagle · Maverick Recording Company · Motown Record Company · music · music downloads · P2P · right to anonymous speech · right to privacy · Second Circuit Court of Appeals · Sony BMG Music Entertainment · Sony Music Entertainment Inc. v. Does 1-40 · State University of New York at Albany · subpoena · SUNYA · UMG Recordings · Virgin Records America · Warner Bros. Records Inc. · Worcester IP Lawyer · Zomba Recording LLC