This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Business News Digital Labels & Publishers Legal
Yout says appeal of stream-ripping ruling in the public interest, wants RIAA legal costs claim paused
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 13 December 2022
Stream-ripping platform Yout has asked a US court to pause a damages claim from the Recording Industry Association Of America so that it can get about appealing the recent ruling regarding whether or not its service contravenes American copyright law.
Yout sued the RIAA after the trade body tried to get its website removed from Google search on copyright grounds, hoping that a US court would confirm that its service is compliant with the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The record companies argued that when Yout allows users to grab permanent downloads of YouTube streams it circumvents technical protection measures put in place by the Google video platform, and American copyright law forbids any such circumvention.
But Yout countered that YouTube doesn’t have any real technical protection measures, pointing out that if you know what you’re doing you can grab a download of a YouTube stream via a web browser. However, the court overseeing the dispute ultimately concluded that the manual process of grabbing a download of a stream was pretty onerous, and that in itself constitutes a technical protection measure which Yout is circumventing.
Having got Yout’s lawsuit dismissed, the RIAA recently returned to court seeking an order forcing the stream ripper to pay $250,000 towards the costs it incurred from this legal battle. Yout should be forced to contribute towards the RIAA’s legal costs, the trade body argued, because its legal claims were always implausible and its lawsuit therefore unreasonable.
Meanwhile, Yout plans to appeal the court’s decision regarding the legal status of its service, taking the matter to the US Second Circuit Appeals Court. And it would like the lower court to stay the RIAA’s legal costs claim while that appeal is in motion.
It presents various arguments for why the legal costs claim should be paused, including that it’s in the public interest for the Second Circuit to review this case, and being forced to hand over $250,000 to the RIAA right now will impact on Yout’s ability to continue with the appeal.
In a court filing earlier this month – now published by Torrentfreak – Yout said that its appeal in relation to “a novel question in copyright law serves the public interest”, and therefore should not be hindered.
“More specifically”, Yout’s filing went on, “many content creators use plaintiff Yout’s services to record their own original videos and they further encourage their audience and fans to use plaintiff Yout to record and play back their original content”.
“Given the substantial reputational and monetary harm [from this legal battle]”, it added, “plaintiff Yout will be unable to continue to provide the Yout service that allows content creators the ability to record and create original content if it is not allowed to appeal the court’s holding”.
It then also noted the possible wider impact of the recent ruling in its RIAA dispute, given that Yout is “based on a modified version of the open-source project youtube-dll”, which is utilised by lots of other people and companies too.
“It is in the public interest that the appellate court determines if services such as Yout, and others that are also based upon the open-source software project youtube-dll (whether commercially exploited or coded and deployed by individual users) constitute circumvention pursuant to the DMCA as held by this court”.
“The legality of software based on youtube-dll has not been fully litigated and reviewed by any appellate court on the merits thus far”, it noted. “Given that the reach of this court’s holding in this matter goes far beyond just this one small business software provider, it is in the public interest that the Second Circuit reviews the merits on appeal”.
“This important and necessary review will be crippled if the instant matter concerning attorneys’ fees is not stayed”, it then claimed. “This factor weighs strongly in favour of granting a stay and as such, plaintiff respectfully requests that the court grant plaintiff Yout’s motion to stay this matter, specifically with respect to attorneys’ fees and costs pending appeal”.
