For those Web companies that comply by it, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is turning out to be their best friend. Last week, Universal Music Group (UMG) was denied a summary judgment by a Los Angeles court in its copyright infringement case against Veoh. (Court order embedded below). UMG wanted a summary judgment against Veoh, arguing that it could not hide behind the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA, which state that Web services are not liable for the copyright infringement of its users if it takes certain steps to prevent it.
This is the second time a summary judgment has been denied to a company trying to sue Veoh for copyright infringement. (The last time it was a porn company). These orders are setting important legal precedents not just for Veoh, but for YouTube and others also facing DMCA lawsuits.
The safe harbor of the DMCA states that Web services are not liable for copyright infringement if the content is stored “at the direction of a user.” UMG tried to argue that Veoh should not be covered by the safe harbor because it did a bunch of things with the music and video content after it was stored on its servers, including converting it into Flash, breaking it up into chunks for peer-to-peer distribution, and allowing other users to stream it or download it.
The judge, A Howartd Matz, didn’t buy the argument. He found Veoh’s position to be “more persuasive,” noting that user’s must agree to Veoh’s Terms of Service before uploading a video, and that the terms of service clearly prohibit uploading copyrighted material. In other words, the initial act of uploading is considered to be user-directed storage under the DMCA, and whatever Veoh does to process the video after that cannot be used to get around the letter of the law.
If you live by the DMCA, be prepared to die by the DMCA.
For anybody that owns or operates a site driven by UGC, this is great news.
Personally, I find that a typical “members” have no compunction about uploading copyright content…however, with warnings, account disablement, bannings, etc, and “abuse reports” it’s not that hard to reign in the issue, even when you have a few million visitors / month…and as your traffic scales like Veoh, shouldn’t your staff to deal with stuff scale, too?
http://www.quan...st.com/veoh.com
So…I guess I don’t see why Universal decided to get agro here.
While it’s easy to say “staff should scale too,” it’s very hard to implement. Assume a site has 2 million visitors per month, and only 50,000 of those visitors uploads one video each month. The expenditure of resources to keep users honest would be enormous and likely drain the coffers.
This is quite an interesting (and in my opinion, positive) decision.
It could have easily gone the other way, as the theory of the case which UMG pursued is actually one of the movie studios’ more plausible arguments.
Good news for web 2.0 and indeed even web 1.0 sites everywhere.
Great discussion on DMCA going on right now at http://www.geek...om/on-ustreamtv
Have you seen any good discussions on Spam? Cuz I’m kinda curious about that.
If you guys would like to discuss in a live chat section you can create or join a crunchie’s chat group at http://groups.im/ it’s easy to use with your instant messengers
This is quite an interesting (and in my opinion, positive) decision.
It could have easily gone the other way, as the theory of the case which UMG pursued is actually one of the movie studios’ more plausible arguments.
Good news for web 2.0 and indeed even web 1.0 sites everywhere.
http://www.jugargame.com
copycat
Being a previous person who worked on a video site (stagewhat?) I’m THRILLED at this outcome. Good for you Veoh!!!!
It’s a really interesting news for every video storage site owner.
Suck it lawyer scum. Now let’s stop erasing all the good stuff on video sites.
at the direction of a user
should be
at the discretion of a user
As a major content producer all you that embrace free content may someday find all of us (that pay to make it) will stop producing it.
Enjoy it while you can becuase if we can’t make any money at it then expect interesting original content to go away, or at least not to thrive.
Does any of this really matter anyway? Veoh will be deadpooled by 2010. No one cares about them and the only views they get are for their illegal content.
Great news but, as pointed out above, it could have easily gone the other way. Though it didn’t come out and say it, the court viewed open communication as more important than copyrights. More at http://digadvis...ne-against-umg/.