This case affirms summary judgment in favor of copyright defendant Giganews’s Usenet service, and upholds massive attorneys’ fees against a plaintiff that shaped US Intermediary Liability law: the adult magazine Perfect 10. The court rejects a direct copyright liability claim, holding that Usenet lacked volition - and that the volition requirement for direct infringement remains intact after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Aereo. It also rejects a contributory liability claim, on the basis that defendant did not materially contribute to infringement. The court discusses the knowledge of specific material, rather than general knowledge of infringement, as it relates to the contributory liability test. It also rejects a claim of inducement liability under the US Supreme Court’s Grokster case. Considering a vicarious...
This case concerns the latest business venture of serial copyright defendant Michael Robertson. In earlier proceedings, a jury ruled against the company, MP3Tunes. Here, the Circuit court considers multiple issues, including repeat infringer policies and red flag knowledge under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Eric Goldman provides a more detailed summary here. Regarding the repeat infringer policy, the Second Circuit says: “at trial the plaintiffs could prevail by demonstrating that MP3tunes's failure to track users who created links to infringing content identified on takedown notices or who copied files from those links evidenced its willful blindness to the repeat infringing activity of its users.” It rejects arguments that this standard amounts to a monitoring requirement, in violation of 17 USC 512(m...
This case considers defenses under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for video hosting service Vimeo. The court rejects plaintiff’s arguments, supported by the US Copyright Office, that the DMCA does not apply to sound recordings from before 1972. It also considers the DMCA’s provision that hosts forfeit their DMCA immunity if they have “red flag” or constructive (not actual) knowledge of infringement. The red flag knowledge dispute centers on “lip dub” videos, in which users lip sync or mouth the words of songs. Plaintiffs maintain that if platform employees see lip dub videos featuring full-length songs on the site, they can be charged with red flag knowledge that the videos are infringing. The court rejects this argument, noting that employees are not copyright or music experts, and cannot be expected to...
Video-sharing website Vimeo LLC cannot be held liable for copyright infringement for unknowingly hosting older music (pre-1972) uploaded by its users. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York held that the safe harbors provided by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) protect qualifying website operators from liability from such pre-1972 recordings, even though they are not covered by federal copyright law. The Court also held that the mere fact that Vimeo employees had viewed videos with copyrighted sound recordings was not enough to prove the company ignored red flags of infringement.
(1) The Court gave some breathing space to creators of User-Generated Content (UGC) from bogus takedown notices in cases of blatant misrepresentation of fair use defences by copyright holders and held that “the statute requires copyright holders to consider fair use before sending take-down notification.” (2) The Court also recognised the possible applicability of section 512(f) of the DMCA that allows for the recognition of damages in case of proved bad-faith, which would occur if the copyright holder did not consider fair use or paid “lip service to the consideration of fair use by claiming it formed a good faith belief when there is evidence to the contrary.” However, the Court noted also that there’s no liability under § 512(f), “if, however, a copyright holder forms a subjective good faith belief the allegedly...
holding that “Aereo publicly performs copyrighted works, in violation of the Copyright Act’s Transmit Clause, when it sells its subscribers a technologically complex service that allows them to watch television programs over the Internet at about the same time as the programs are broadcast over the air.” However, the dissenting opinion argued that turning a secondary liability case into a direct liability case is a mistake and may work serious injury to the general public. Justice Scalia strongly objected to the majority view and noted that “Aereo does not perform at all. The Court manages to reach the opposite conclusion only by disregarding widely accepted rules for service-provider . . . liability and adopting in their place an improvised standard ("looks-like-cable-TV") that will sow confusion for years to come.”...