Advanced Copyright Issues on the Internet - Fenwick & West LLP

k. Io Group v. Veoh Networks. In Io Group, Inc. v.Veoh Networks, Inc., 1949 a decision by a magistrate judge, Veoh operated a user-generatedcontent web site through which users could also access videos from Veoh’s content partners.Once video files were uploaded to Veoh’s system, Veoh’s employees selected videos to befeatured on the “Featured Videos” portion of the web site. A number of clips submitted by userscontained content from the Io Group’s copyrighted sexually explicit videos, and Io Group suedVeoh for copyright infringement for hosting the clips without giving prior notice to Veoh ordemanding that Veoh take down the allegedly infringing material. Veoh asserted the safe harborunder Section 512(c). 1950Before users could upload videos to Veoh’s site, they were required to register and agreeto abide by the Terms of Use and Acceptable Use policies posted on the site. The Terms of Usestated that Veoh reserved the right to monitor user-submitted material and to remove it from thesite, that the user was not permitted to publish or make available any material that infringed thirdparty intellectual property rights, and that the user represented and warranted that it had all rightsnecessary to publish and distribute any material submitted to the site. Upon each upload ofparticular material, the user was presented with an explicit reminder that it must not uploadcopyrighted, pornographic, obscene, violent, or other videos that violate Veoh’s applicablepolicies. Upon receiving a notice that a user had uploaded infringing content after a firstwarning, the user’s account would be terminated, all content provided by that user disabled(unless the content was also published by another non-terminated user and was not the subject ofa DMCA notice), and the user’s email address would be blocked so that a new account could notbe opened with that same address. Veoh also had the ability to disable access to such materialon its users’ hard drives if their computers were still connected to the Internet, and it had adoptedmeans for generating a digital fingerprint for each video file that enabled Veoh to terminateaccess to any other identical files and prevent additional identical files from ever being uploadedby any user. 1951When users uploaded a video to Veoh’s system, they would provide certain metadataabout the video, including title, description, tags, selection of up to four categories bestdescribing the video, and a content rating. Upon receiving a video submission, Veoh’scomputers would first confirm that the submitted file was, in fact, a video file with a compatiblecodec, and if so, the system would extract the file format and length, assign a unique video IDnumber to it, index the user-entered metadata and store the information in a database on Veoh’sservers. The database also automatically indexed video files into a series of lists, such as “MostRecent,” “Top Rated,” “Most Popular,” “Most Discussed,” and “Top Favorite.” In addition tosaving the file in its original format, which users could download using Veoh’s client software,the system also automatically converted the file into Flash format. The system also extractedduring the upload process 16 full resolution screen captures (screencaps) and 16 lower resolutionscreencaps. One of the lower resolution screencaps was used to represent the video in a searchresult which, when clicked on, took the user to a video details page containing the video and a1949 586 F. Supp. 1132 (N.D. Cal. 2008).1950 Id. at 1135-36.1951 Id. at 1137-38.- 420 -