Megan Geuss, writing for Ars Technica:
Last summer, Liberation had a video of one of Lessig’s lectures (called “Open,” which is embedded above) taken down when the company found that he had used video clips with Phoenix’s music in it. Lessig, in collaboration with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, challenged the takedown and sued Liberation, arguing that he was well within his right to use Phoenix’s music under fair use policies. (Phoenix, for its part, wrote that it was happy to have its music remixed under fair use principles.)
Lessig teamed up with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to extract damages from Liberation under the DCMA’s section 512(f), which requires copyright holders to pay damages if they overstep their bounds in issuing a takedown. As Ars noted last summer, hardly any copyright holders have ever had to pay damages under 512(f).
How clueless does one have to be to issue a copyright threat against Larry Lessig, the tech world’s foremost authority on copyright and fair use?