Over at the Wired’s Threat Level blog is this post about the recent legal “victory” for online content hosting sites like Veoh, YouTube, MySpace and others like them, which appear to have added yet another layer of copyright infringement immunity to their arsenal. As Wired explains, the victory occurred in the ongoing California federal court case UMG v. Veoh, in which UMG sued Veoh for copyright infringement under a number of theories, and Veoh defended that its actions were immune under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act’s (”DMCA”) “safe harbor” provisions. The legal victory for Veoh was in a December 29, 2008 Order by the Judge Matz, in which the Judge held that four of Veoh’s software functions fall within the scope of the safe harbor provisions.
The safe harbor provisions give service providers like Veoh immunity from money damages for some types of copyright infringement. Specifically, providers are immune when storing user content (the official statute language is “by reason of the storage at the direction of a user“) on their system or network, if the service providers implement a notice-and-takedown system. Basically this means that, with some qualifications, if providers like Veoh quickly remove or disable any stored copyright infringing materials placed by users on their systems, then they won’t be subject to damages.
UMG requested Judge Matz to find that four of Veoh’s software functions don’t fit within the definition of “storage at the direction of a user.” Jude Matz refused, and held the opposite — that they do fall within that definition.
The four functions concern enabling users to access stored videos. They are as follows:
- Automatically creating flash-formatted copies of video files uploaded by users;
- Automatically creating copies of uploaded video files that are comprised of smaller “chunks” of the original file;
- Allowing users to access uploaded videos via streaming technology; &
- Allowing users to access uploaded videos by downloading who video files.
The impact of Judge Matz’s Order is that a crucial aspect of Veoh’s business — enabling users to access the videos — appears to be safe because it falls under the safe harbor provisions. Other video sharing sites like YouTube and MySpace certainly will be comforted by the Order.
The Order was not a total victory for Veoh, however, because the case is not over. UMG simply lost a motion for partial summary judgment, which means Judge Matz was not convinced at this stage of the case that it could rule in UMG’s favor. So we’ll have to wait and see what comes next. Let us know if you hear of any further developments with this case or others like it.
For more about the impact of the DMCA on Web 2.0 companies, check out this Wired article.
And here’s a link to Judge Matz’s Order.
Tags: copyright, dmca, infringement, safe harbors
