Cherry Lane Music Publishing has announced it is joining a class action lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company Google. They are joining that litigation launched against the video sharing website by music publishers Bourne Co and the Football Association Premier League in the New York courts last month. The two original plaintiffs in that case have moved to make their lawsuit a class action so that any content owners who believe the video service is violating their copyrights can rely on the litigation, assuming it is successful, to enforce their rights.
As previously reported, the Bourne/FA case, like the separate but similar lawsuit launched against the video site by MTV owners Viacom, should test whether YouTube and Google bosses are right in their argument that, because they pledge to remove any copyright content as soon as content owners alert them to its presence on their platform, they are operating in line with the US's Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Those pursuing legal action against YouTube argue that that is an incorrect interpretation of the law, and that content owners cannot be expected to monitor YouTube at their own expense in order to identify unauthorised content while the video site profits from that content's presence until it is discovered.
Google's general counsel Kent Walker recently issued a statement again setting out their interpretation of the law, saying: "These suits simply misunderstand the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which balances the rights of copyright holders against the need to protect internet communications and content. As a result, they threaten the way people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment, and political and artistic expression over the internet. Most content owners understand that we respect copyrights, we work every day to help them manage their content, and we are developing state-of-the-art tools to let them do that even better".