On the day of the Google/YouTube acquisition, YouTube announced a licensing deal with Universal Music. Apparently, Grouper and Bolt.com didn’t get the memo. Universal Music has come out swinging in their first online video-related lawsuit against two of the lesser-known online video sharing websites, Bolt.com and Sony’s recent acquisition, Grouper.
The lawsuit takes aim at the websites’ ability for users to swap pirated versions of its’ musicians videos and seeks as much as $150,000 for each incident of copyright infringement.
Bolt.com operates much like YouTube, allowing users to only view Flash versions of the videos in their web browser without any ability to copy the video to their physical computer. Shutdown Bolt.com or remove any materials from the website, and they are no longer accessible by anyone. Alternatively, Grouper users can download the videos to their computer, iPod, or PSP. Thus, similar to how the old Napster operated with music, if a user downloaded a physical copy of a Grouper video to their computer, then the user will be able to view it indefinitely, even if Grouper were to shut down or remove the videos from Grouper.com.
Surprisingly, other websites weren’t mentioned in this lawsuit. Metacafe is larger than both Grouper and Bolt.com (according to Alexa data) and a search for Universal Music artist Mariah Carey resulted in several music videos of her, along with a pre-roll video advertisement for CareerBuilder. Another that wasn’t named in the lawsuit is Guba, which has blatant copyright infringement occurring on their website as a result of their indexing pirated videos from Usenet. Despite teaming with the MPAA and supposedly cracking down on piracy with software called “Johnny,” users can easily view tons of music videos on Guba’s website or download them to their computer, iPod, or PSP. A search on Guba for Universal Music artist Mary J. Blige, returned several of her music videos.
According to comScore, Bolt.com had 8.1 million unique visitors in August and Grouper had 1.8 million — whereas YouTube had 72.1 million.
I wanted to add something like this, however being that (deep-pocketed) Sony owns Grouper, it kills my logic…
“This is the first lawsuit that a major label has filed against an online video sharing website, and likely not the last. Highly suspect is the lack of other similar websites that are much larger and likely breaking some copyrights, such as AOL Video, Yahoo Video, MySpace Video or MSN Video. Universal Music is likely going after these smaller websites to win in the courts and set a precedent for when they go after the larger websites. Will the big boys come to the legal rescue of their smaller competitors to help avoid their own day in court?”
This is big-dick waggin…Universal made a deal with gooTube (I wished I owned the .com; excellent name for a porno site)…so lawsuit time. Warner and Fox want some gooTube action as well; but I guess I’m one of the only ones to hear about it…as it hasn’t been reported here.
but its obvious…the guys in the board-rooms, which run these companies see the 1.65 billion gooTube and its like blood in the water, here come the sharks…they’re probably teaming up, talking shit, playing golf, strategizing; etc…its money time, and the content providers, the major ones…can really pull out a can of some woop ass. copyright violation is 150K per violation…gooTube videos get on average 10K views for dancing to music?
do the math?
it’ll probably end-up like an orgy, everyone trying to fuck everyone; but Google is the one everyone wants to rape…she’s pretty and has money…and…owns no content; yet…if I was sony…boom…woop-ass on gooTube, if I was Fox, boom, woop ass on gooTube, guber, and grouper…
from my perspective…mySpace wins, gooTube becomes really boring (which it is now…I can’t find any of the latest CNN, Daily Shows, etc.) and Google survives. Sony feels the pain, but makes a turn around after re-aligning the whole company…(sony is pretty messed up right now); and the content makers earn some money from their out of date catelogs.
just my perspective…of course, my company, comes out smelling like a rose…
Now INAL, but I do know that the filing of a suit(s) of this nature didn’t happen overnight. More often than not a lot of back-and-forth had already taken place, negotiations, threats blah blah. And then there is issue of the selection of jurisdiction, practical mattters like assembling evidence and so on.
Just because “everyone knows” that there is potentially infringing material posted doesn’t mean sh*t in court. You gotta prove it and provide all the backup in the filings, and down the road.
So to my point… other suits may or may not be in the works, or may or may not have been in the works for a while, against the other sites mentioned and unknown others.
It would be a mistake to draw a conclusion that these suits are a knee-jerk or opportunistic reaction to the YouTube deal, though, perhaps, some thought went into the timing of the actual filing.
Whatever the case, this should be interesting!
Nick,
What kind of proof do they need to prove infringement?
@What kind of proof do they need to prove infringement?
a screen shot.
And so it starts…
Amit, I believe it would be something along the lines of documenting exactly how a piece of copyrighted material was found on the service. In painful detail, step-by-step. times, places, who did the checking, what they did to access a file, what they observed. Then statements from the copyright holder saying “yes that’s our material and we did not license it.”
Yeah, there may be screen-shots, and other electronic evidence as well.
But, these suits are not having a court decide or pass judgment. It’s about forcing a settlement between the parties. Cases like this can take years in court. This’ll get settled in weeks, out of court.
Already in the last hour this statement has appeared:
“We’ve made overtures to Universal before now and we’re hoping that they’d like to have a robust dialog in the same way they did with YouTube,” said Bolt’s Cohen.”
Once the precedent is set there’ll be a lot of action and a lot of deals.
Not every site owner will back down, some may fight. Some will squeal like a pig. Some may move offshore. And some may shutdown.
So listen, if they win, we can all make tons of money!! You quitely submit something that you own — and sue the hosting website!!!
$150,000 seems to justify the effort.
Don’t think for a minute that YouTube is immune from these types of lawsuits/saber rattling bacause of the Google acquisition announcement – remember the deal is not closed.
Once the $1.65B valuation got put up there for everyone to see, there’s a concrete measurement of value creation and the content owners want a piece of the pie.
An interesting thought exercise: Does anyone think Google/YouTube could fall through under certain ligitous conditions? The deal is not to close until end of 4th quarter. If the deal looks to be too expensive, then I wonder what sort of “out” clauses is in the GooTube deal….
Mark Cuban was probably right…
http://www.blog...11/i-was-wrong/
Finally. I’m surprised it took this long. By the way, I’m sure the founders of Grouper are chilling somewhere by the beach, puffig their cigars and thanking Sony for the $65 million Christmas gift.
Could the fact that MetaCafe is based in Israel have anything to do with why they were not included in the complaint? I’m sure there are minimum contacts, but perhaps more headache involved ??? Not sure.
cuban is always right
Your Maria Carey link is leading to a “Removed” message. too bad. i like her.
They did pull that Mariah Carey link — here’s another video on their site by her that you can watch
http://www.meta...203920/get_you/
Of course Cuban is always right.
MC is the man.
I don’t understand why any of these services would be liable for the material that the users of that service have uploaded.
As long as they remove infringing files that they have actual knowledge of aren’t they safe?
Shouldn’t a law-suite be filed against the user that has uploaded a file/shared it?
The only reason that I can think of that the service can be made liable is that they have edited the files by converting them into flash-files.
@Florian: Because they collect revenues against said videos. In YouTube’s case, they are taking a big fat buyout payday for inventory that contains a large number of copyrighted material. The DCMA is pretty clear about the liability of a company when their service is generating revenue from copyrighted material. In your statement “they have actual knowledge of ” is misleading, YouTube only takes down material at the request of others. This puts burdens on copyright holders to police 100’s of VideoSharing sites to look for their content.
I think this is going all the way to the top, i.e. Supreme Court, because there needs to be a clarification on the Safe Harbour Laws, as some think that it is being misapplied here.
@chris
I bet they forbid copyright infringements by their TOS. So they are not actually trying to make revenue from the infringing files but from files that have been spread by the copyright holder. So this is clearly an abuse of the service in my opinion. If the shared files would be moderated it would be different.
About making revenue from the videos: I don’t think that bolt.com for instance is making direct revenue from the videos. They are not selling them. Rather they have an ad on the page that shows the video (along with other content).
I’m very interested in the outcome of this lawsuit. I think what is going to happen is that bolt.com for instance will be asked to give out the data of the users that have infringed the copyrights.
@Florian,
I understand your position, but I don’t agree with it. Are they giving back money to content owners when they take down material that they arleady received ad $$’s from? No.
Also, in the sale to Google(which is a *huge* liquidity event and will make lots of money for YouTube) will YouTube go through and remove all copyrighted content from it’s inventory before the sale is completed? Again, I don’t think so, and thus they will directly profit from this material. So the founder’s, employees, and investors will personally gain from ill-gotten goods.
In the end it doesn’t matter what you and I think, it ultimately comes down to 2 simple decisions that we don’t control and can only speculate upon.
a) Content Owners deciding whether they wish to enforce their rights since the now see others making money from their property
b) What the law says
Clearly, b) need clarification. Personally, I don’t think YouTube (and it’s ilk) falls under the Safe Harbour provisions of the DCMA, but I’m not a lawyer and not a supreme court justice. And neither is you. Given the large stakes now in the billions, I could easily see dozens of content owners joining resources ($$$, legal teams) to fight it out.
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