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The footage of an actress' minor role in an unreleased adventure film titled “Desert Warrior”, was modified and incorporated into an anti-Islamic film titled the "Innocence of the Muslims", which was later uploaded to Youtube. The actress then received death threats from an Egyptian cleric. After Google refused to take it down from Youtube, plaintiff actress sought a restraining order seeking removal and that posting of the video infringed the copyright in her performance. 9th Circuit Judge Kozinski ruled for the actress, holding that she had an independent copyright interest in her performance (although filmmaker had an implied license to use her performance, the filmmaker exceeded the bounds of the license); and that the actress faced irreparable harm absent an injunction.

Capitol Records (CR), a record company, sued ReDigi, which operated an online marketplace for buying and selling pre-owned legally downloaded music, for copyright infringement regarding reproduction and distribution rights in sound recordings owned by CR. The Court held in favour of the plaintiff-copyright holder and rejected ReDigi’s “first sale” and “fair use” defenses. The Court sustained that Redigi's directly infringed CR's copyrights. In particular, the Court held that (1) ReDigi’s making unauthorized transfers of digital music files over the internet was reproduction and distribution for the purpose of copyright protection; (2) the “first sale” doctrine did not cover ReDigi’s distribution of CR’s copyrighted works; (3) ReDigi was also liable for contributory infringement and vicarious infringement of CR’s...

Music publisher brought action against operator of publicly accessible website, Veoh, which enabled users to share videos with other users and website’s investors, alleging direct and secondary copyright infringement. District court dismissed the claims against investors and granted summary judgment to website operator. Circuit judge held that Veoh was entitled to the DMCA safe harbor protection, that is the site has no obligation to police for infringing content on its site, and that publishers failed to state claims against investors for contributory infringement, vicarious liability and inducement of infringement.

(1) This Bill was introduced to provide new tools to enforce online copyright infringment. These measures applied to "foreign infinging sites". This definition includes (i) U.S.-directed sites used by users in the United States; (ii) whose owners or operators are committing or facilitating the commission of criminal violations; and (iii) which would be subject to seizure in the United States in an action brought by the Attorney General if such site were a domestic Internet site. (2) The most relevant enforcement tools included (i) the requesting of court orders requiring Internet service providers to block access to the websites (ii) the requesting of court orders barring search engines from linking to the infringing websites, (iii) court orders barring advertising networks and payment facilities from conducting...

(1) Capitol Records, which owns copyrights in sound recordings, musical compositions, and images of album cover art, sued MP3Tunes, an online music storage service provider whose website allows users to store music files in their personal online music “lockers." On MP3Tunes, users can search for and transfer songs to their lockers. (2) The Court held in favor of MP3Tunes. The Court found that MP3Tunes qualified for safe harbor under DMCA, except when the songs were transferred from certain unauthorized websites. In this regard the Court noted that “if enabling a party to download infringing material was sufficient to create liability, then even search engines like Google or Yahoo! would be without DMCA protection. In that case, the DMCA’s purpose — innovation and growth of internet services — would be undermined." (3)...