Search Engine Fights Fox News Infringement Charge

In the Second Circuit, a searchable media monitoring service called TVEyes has appealed a district court decision that cleared it of direct copyright infringement, but – in what a post on IPFrontline calls a departure from established precedent – said some of the features of the service could facilitate infringement and thus precluded a fair use defense. The legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed an amicus brief in the case, maintains that a finding of infringement based on “the hypothetical conduct” of a user would put many new technologies at risk. According to another EFF attorney, quoted in this post, the Fox News lawsuit is the latest in a long line of failed copyright-based challenges to important and useful search engines.