Friday, July 06, 2012

Something I wondered about SocialCam before I blocked it

According to this post, not only does SocialCam repost YouTube videos, it mislabels them as having been recorded with SocialCam at recent dates.  I presume SocialCam's idea is that rerecording counts as recording, but it does seem misleading.  Actionable?  What says Dastar?

3 comments:

James Grimmelmann said...

SocialCam isn't even rerecording, so I have a hard time seeing how the claim "recorded with Socialcam" is anything other than false. It's reproducing the video files, perhaps transcoding them, but "recorded" in this context would imply that SocialCam had some role in capturing the live events in video form, which it didn't.

RT said...

I agree, but Dastar has been applied to bar other claims I thought obviously went beyond "by," and recorded v. copied might not be enough.

James Grimmelmann said...

I can see that. The idea that "recording" applies only to the fixation of something happening in real time is reflected in various places in copyright law, e.g. 1101, the definition of "sound recording," and the line of cases from Burrow-Giles on that treat the controller of the fixation technology as the author. These all regard recording as an authorially significant event. So this may hinge on whether "recorded" is problematic because it implies that SocialCam played a meaningful role in making the videos what they are, or because it implies that SocialCam was a tool used by the true creators of the videos. "Recorded by Sony Pictures" vs. "Recorded by Sony video cameras."