With all the leaving dos that have been going on in the vicinity of EMI's Brook Green HQ in the last week you'd be forgiven for thinking that there's no one left at the major to be doing anything as taxing as issuing copyright litigation, but someone in EMI's legal department had time last week to launch a lawsuit against popular social networking website Hi5 and web-video-service provider VideoEgg. The lawsuit alleges that the two companies, by allowing users to upload videos by EMI artists without their permission, are guilty of copyright infringement.
VideoEgg, for their part, have responded with the usual defence for such litigation - that they do not support the use of their service for the unlicensed posting of other people's content, and that they take down such content quickly when given notice by a content owner, adding that they had received no such notice from EMI. Given that some legal types don't think that defence alone would stand up in court (it is still to be tested in the US courts, but could well be with the ongoing MTV/YouTube action), VideoEgg add that not only do they have a rapid unlicensed-content-removal-system, but that they also employ the Audible Magic filtering system which tries to stop users uploaded any content that has been logged as unlicensed by a content owner.
EMI have not responded to VideoEgg's response. It remains to be seen if, as is often the case in these legal disputes, a licensing deal is struck between the net firms and the major before it actually gets to court.