Posted on 07/20/2010 4:21:25 PM PDT by Jim Robinson
A recent decision by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York has confirmed that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provides a “safe harbor” for service providers who expeditiously take down allegedly infringing content when they receive written notice from copyright owners.
In what may be the first round of a $1 billion dispute -- ongoing since 2007 -- Google subsidiary YouTube, Inc. won a summary judgment motion against Viacom, Inc., the owner of MTV, Comedy Central and other cable television channels, over copyright infringement liability for the posting of Viacom videos on YouTube.com (Viacom Int’l, Inc. v. YouTube, Inc., S.D.N.Y., No. 07 Civ. 2103, June 23, 2010). At issue was secondary liability for tens of thousands of Viacom videos broadcast on YouTube. The content was posted by YouTube account holders, viewed at no charge millions of times by other visitors to that website and accompanied by advertisements. Viacom alleged that Google willfully ignored the infringing activities of its account holders in order to reap advertising profits.
The “critical question” in this case, wrote Judge Louis Stanton, was whether YouTube should be liable for failing to act when it had a “general awareness” of copyright infringement on the site, as opposed to “knowledge of specific and identifiable infringements of individual items.” The court concluded that YouTube bore no liability because it had complied with the DMCA by quickly removing the offending content when Viacom specifically identified the offending uses. YouTube’s swift response, as well as its adherence to other requirements imposed by the DMCA, gave it immunity from Viacom’s claims despite any generalized knowledge it may have had of infringement on the site...
(Excerpt) Read more at lexology.com ...
Well, there you go.
Dingy Harry can stuff it.
I hope you get FR’s suit dismissed quick. It looks like they are trying an SCO-Linux type pattern.
Does this mean you may change the rules and all sources that are banned for copyright requests (such as Wired) can possibly be posted and it is the responsibility of said sites to issue a DMCA request for removal? IE, FR says they are not responsible for policing copyrights, that is solely up to the copyright owner to police and request removal?
No, but I am saying that ever since we settled the LAT/WP suit nearly 10 years ago, we’ve always promptly complied with all DMCA takedown notices and even just simple emailed or snail mail requests to excerpt or remove or not allow content to be posted whether there were legal threats included or not. It’s a shame this outfit jumped straight to lawsuit without even contacting us. Hopefully we will be protected by the DMCA.
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