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Veoh win another copyright case – impact on Viacom v YouTube
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 7 January 2009
Oh, look at that, we turn our backs for the Christmas break and a very interesting copyright case gets resolved in the US courts. You do find copyright litigation interesting don’t you? Go on, you know you love it.
Anyway, this was a copyright action launched by Universal Music against YouTube rival Veoh and centered on some very specific issues regarding the interpretation of the US laws governing online copyright. It’s interesting because of the impact it possibly has on one of the big online music legal battles still to go to court -Viacom v YouTube.
As previously reported, there is some legal dispute in the US regarding what obligations the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 puts on video sharing sites like YouTube and Veoh regarding the posting, by punters, of content without the content owner’s permission.
The video sharing services have differentiated themselves from those dodgy P2P file sharing services like Limewire because, although they do frequently host infringing content on their servers, they have in place a system whereby content owners can complain if their copyrights are infringed and infringing content is quickly removed.
Because these servers generally (although not exclusively) offer content as streams instead of downloads, such removal is effective because most people (ie those not clever enough to turn a stream into a download, which is most people) lose access to the infringing content once it is done.
They argue that, under the DMCA, that means they are not guilty of infringement, even though they may host infringing content from time to time. While the big content owners don’t necessarily disagree with that viewpoint completely, they argue there is an obligation on the video websites to put in place technical or human systems that better monitor the uploading of videos to stop infringing content from going online to start with.
Otherwise, they argue, the onus is on them the content owner to constantly monitor every single video website on the planet – a potentially expensive pursuit.
The big ongoing legal case on this issue is Viacom v YouTube, with the MTV owner suing the flagship video sharing website on the basis they are not doing enough to stop content from their various TV channels from being posted.
Both sides have experts who swear blind their interpretation of the DMCA on this issue is right, but YouTube’s case was strengthened last summer when their rivals Veoh won a similar but smaller lawsuit brought against them by porn company Io Group.
The similar and more recent Universal case against Veoh centred on one specific bit of the DMCA – one of the so called ‘safe harbor’ clauses that says tech firms who simply host digital content on behalf of users can not be held liable if a customer uploads unlicensed content to their servers.
Although really designed to protect those companies who offer remote digital storage facilities, this clause is one used in the aforementioned defence put forward by YouTube, Veoh etc.
But Universal argued that Veoh not only stored content uploaded by punters, they also automatically transcoded it into a Flash video format, created copies of the file, and allowed third parties to access to infringing content. Those activities, not mentioned in the DMCA, could not, Universal argued, be exempted from infringement claims under a safe harbour clause that only referenced storage of files for third parties.
The Io Group unsuccessfully argued similar points in their case against Veoh. And over Christmas the US courts rejected Universal’s version of the argument too, strengthening the video site’s defence against infringement charges made by the likes of Universal.
While Veoh isn’t especially used by music video fans (most opting for the predominantly licensed YouTube instead), this ruling, coupled with the Io Group ruling from last summer, potentially weakens Viacom’s case in its litigation against YouTube. To the extent, some legal experts argue, that that legal battle might not be as landmark a case as some had expected – with many of the disputed points of law being settled in earlier smaller cases.
