Please don't confuse my bluntness for rudeness. If I know something to be wrong I won't sugar coat it, I will state it unequivocally, in no uncertain terms. If it is apparent that you, or anyone else, do not know what they are talking about I
will call you, or anyone else, out for it. Don't get me wrong, its not personal, its not an "attack" meant to humiliate you, and I do respect you as a person - you have, thus far, done nothing wrong for me to not to - but that does not mean that I will gladly beat around the bush to spare feelings over something I know to be wrong.
The mistake you appear to be making here is viewing the Copyright and Rights in Performances (Quotation and Parody) Regulations 2014 Statutory Instrument (SI) as a stand-alone document. The SI only really makes sense when viewed in the wider context of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (the Act) that it amends (the link provided above is to the version of the Act that
includes the SI's amendments). The SI
has to be viewed
with the Act prior to the SI's amendments, as if they were one single document, but its just easier to forget about the SI and refer to the amended Act itself.
Having said that, here's the bad news. Your above statement ("quotation of an
entire copyrighted work [...] is permitted in circumstances where the work is available to the public, is in context of the new work and is fair") is, in a general sense in which you seem to be using them, demonstrably
not true.
First of all the circumstances you mention, which come from the SI, only pertain to Section 30 of the Act - "Criticism, review, [quotation] and news reporting". Uploading a copyrighted image to a website, regardless of its ultimate use, that falls outside of the scope of criticism, review and news reporting (which use on a livery
would fall outside of)
is de facto copyright infringement. I'd love to hear your argument how using a copyrighted logo as part of a livery falls under criticism, review and news reporting?
Secondly use of "entire" works in explicitly
not permitted; Subsection (1ZA), clause (b) states: "
the extent of the quotation is no more than is required by the specific purpose for which it is used". To illustrate this in a practical example: You couldn't upload an entire Star Wars movie to YouTube with a 30 second critique of why a particular scene in the middle doesn't make sense and claim it is "fair use" because the amount of content used would be disproportionate to that which is absolutely necessary. Similarly you couldn't upload an entire 500 page book as a "quote" to a blog just to criticise paragraph 2 on page 183. Again, the amount of content used would be disproportionate to that which is absolutely necessary for the critique.
Here is the full text of Section 30 of the Act (which includes the amendments from the SI) with the most pertinent sections highlighted:
View attachment 749706
I could go through it subsection-by-subsection and clause-by-clause but that would take too long; hopefully, viewing the amendments in context, along with the highlighted sections for guidance, you'll conclude for yourself why your interpretation of the SI (or the "guidance" you've seen) is wrong.
Sorry to tell you this but your interpretation of that is also wrong. Not only is it
not a "guideline" - its a law - but once again it is
only pertinent to the scope of Section 30 of the Act, again, for the purpose of
criticism, review and news reporting. Its getting terribly tiresome having to repeat myself but uploading a copyrighted logo to a website (even with acknowledgement) for use on a livery does
not fall under the scope of criticism, review and news reporting. How many times am I going to have to repeat that?
Again, lets look at the SI's amendments, in place, in the Act:
View attachment 749718
The amendments in the SI are
not the magic-bullet-get-out-of-jail-free-card you think they are.
Wrong. The Act has already defined what is, and isn't, fair; courts decide to what degree constitutes fairness. For instance, its already established, in section 30, that its fair to use a quotation of "no more than is required", it is up to the courts to decide, on a case-by-case basis, what constitutes a "required" amount. This is not a subject where a hard-and-fast rule can enter into case law and then be used as a reference for
all other similar instances.
I'm not entirely sure where you have got this "doesn't cause the owner to lose revenue" stuff from as it doesn't feature in the SI or the Act. I suspect you've suddenly switched to US law (as I believe thats where that it is from), without stating you have done so, to intentionally fudge the issue in support of your own argument. If it
is from UK legislation I'd be grateful if you could point me in the direction of the relevant Act and the section that contains it.
However, until you provide me with that information, and now the the subject of US law has been raised...
I'm sorry - and please don't confuse my bluntness for rudeness - but you are
completely, totally and laughably incorrect, and that statement unequivocally reveals your lack of knowledge of this subject.
To see why lets examine Sony's
own terms and conditions:
View attachment 749690
Although it doesn't directly state it the last line of section 4 ("All User Generated Content made available on our Sites is the sole responsibility of the person who provided it.") is a simplified version of rules laid out in the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which is applicable here as Sony's network, for the purpose of law jurisdiction, is US based; As long as the site owner, in this instance Sony, is in compliance with the DMCA it cannot be held responsible for User Generated Content (UGC).
In Section 5 Sony provides a mechanism to resolve copyright infringement claims in accordance with the DMCA. This mechanism is a requirement of the DMCA, the provisioning of which then confers the protection, stated in Section 4, against UGC copyright infringement to site owners. As long as Sony complies with lawful DMCA take-down requests it will
not find itself in court regarding UGC copyright infringement.
The
only time it becomes Sony's problem, with the possibility of Sony's lawyers finding themselves in front of a judge, is if they fail to comply with lawful take-down requests; in that instance they lose the DMCA's UGC protection stated in Section 4 and then become liable for the infringement themselves.
This is
exactly how YouTube survives in the face of the petabytes of copyright infringing UGC that they hold; as long as they provide a mechanism to file copyright infringement claims, and comply with lawful takedown requests, they are protected, by the DMCA, against copyright infringement by their users.
Now I know you're probably thinking: "but the DMCA is an American law, it only applies in America", but that is not strictly true either. Due to the global nature of the internet, many companies (especially multi-nationals) outside of the US have become DMCA compliant because their site is ultimately available in the US and, if they want to operate lawfully, must comply with US laws. This works the other way too; many services outside of the EU have complied with the EU's new (as of 2018) General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) to lawfully offer their services within the EU.
Now, in the face of completely contradictory evidence, do you
still stand by your statement that copyright disputes are only between the site/service owner and the copyright holder?
From what I can gather, from the snippets of that old case I can find online, it was a trademark suit, not copyright, and Sony won that case primarily because they had permission (a licence) to 3D scan and photograph anything in situ at the track for their "artistic" representation of the track. If PD had of used the Virag logo at a track (real or fantasy)
other than Monza Sony would have, without a shadow of a doubt, lost the case as its use would be out of context and not actually part of the artistic representation of a place it was creating.
This is the reason why you and I can walk around (in the UK at least, although US laws are very similar) taking pictures of
anything in public, or in/on private property with permission, and exhibit or sell those pictures (regardless of trademark or copyright law). I'll give you two examples:
- If you or I took an amazing race picture at Monza, in which Virags logo was visible, that went on to sell thousands of copies and made you or I a fortune there is not a thing, as the above case proves, that Virag could do; its an artistic representation in which the Virag logo is publicly visible (and , in UK law, incidental).
- If you or I took a series of photos of (publicly visible) McDonalds signs and exhibited/sold them there is not a thing McDonalds could do, although they could try, as its an artistic representation of something in a public place which there is an implicit permission to photograph.
The point is PD had permission, from the Monza management, to scan/photograph anything that is on their property and US law allows them to do so as its protected as an artistic en devour (just like the photo examples I gave above). There is also another important distinction to be made here; as far as I can tell Virag wasn't attempting to have its logo removed from the game, it (mistakenly) saw an opportunity for an easy pay-day and summarily had its ass handed to it (no doubt due to the "advice" of a parasitic lawyer who will tell potential clients anything they want to hear because lawyers get paid win or lose).
