U.S. Court Decision Good News For Online Video Sites
By Anna Johnson on August 29th, 2008Good news for online video sites – earlier this week, Judge Howard Lloyd, a judge on the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, dismissed adult entertainment company IO Group’s 2006 copyright infringement case against Veoh.
IO Group sued Veoh over allowing some user-uploaded porn content on Veoh’s service. Veoh took the content down after receiving Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) take-down notices from IO Group… but that didn’t stop IO Group from also suing the online video service.
A key question in the case was whether or not Veoh should lose DMCA “safe harbour” protection as a result of transcoding user uploaded videos into the Flash file format. Fortunately for Veoh, the court ruled that the company WAS protected by the “safe harbour” provisions.
In what should be good news for all sites that host user-uploaded videos, the court held that online video sites are protected under the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA, provided they take a number of measures to prevent copyrighted material from appearing on their sites.
Such measures include: specifically notifying users that uploading copyrighted material is prohibited; taking infringing content down within a day or so of receiving a take-down notice; using measures to detect copyrighted material (including spot- checking videos); terminating infringing users; and ensuring that the majority of uploaded content is non-infringing.
Judge Lloyd also said that transcoding files to Flash format does not transfer control over the files to an online video service, such that the service would still be protected by the DMCA safe harbor provisions.
It’s likely the Veoh ruling will be appealed, but it does indicate that some cooler heads – and those familiar with the Internet – may be prevailing within the judiciary. At least for now.
Source: Michael Arrington, “Transcoding Is Not A Crime, Says Court In Veoh Porn Case”, TechCrunch, August 28, 2008, Michael Arrington, “What The Veoh Decision Means For YouTube And Others”, TechCrunch, August 28, 2008
