Advanced Copyright Issues on the Internet - Fenwick & West LLP

Accordingly, the court granted Veoh’s motion for summary judgment under the Section512(c) safe harbor. It cautioned however, thatthe decision rendered here is confined to the particular combination of facts inthis case and is not intended to push the bounds of the safe harbor so wide thatless than scrupulous service providers may claim its protection. Nevertheless, thecourt does not find that the DMCA was intended to have Veoh shoulder the entireburden of policing third-party copyrights on its website (at the cost of losing itsbusiness if it cannot). Rather, the issue is whether Veoh takes appropriate steps todeal with copyright infringement that takes place. The record presenteddemonstrates that, far from encouraging copyright infringement, Veoh has astrong DMCA policy, takes active steps to limit incidents of infringement on itswebsite and works diligently to keep unauthorized works off its website. 1962l. UMG Recordings v. Veoh Networks. The case ofUMG Recordings, Inc. v. Veoh Networks, Inc. 1963 involved the same user-generated content site,Veoh Networks, as the case described in the previous subsection. The plaintiffs, who ownedrights to copyrighted sound recordings and musical compositions allegedly used withoutauthorization in user-submitted videos to the site, sought summary judgment that Veoh was notentitled to the Section 512(c) safe harbor because of four functions performed by Veoh’ssoftware that the plaintiffs claimed were not “storage” and were not undertaken “at the directionof the user”: automatically creating Flash formatted copies of video files uploaded by users,automatically creating copies of uploaded video files that are comprised of smaller chunks of theoriginal file, allowing users to access uploaded videos via streaming, and allowing users toaccess uploaded videos by downloading whole video files. The court denied the plaintiff’smotion. 1964The court noted that the IoGroup case had held that Section 512(c) was applicable to thecreation of Flash formatted files, but the applicability of Section 512(c) to the other threechallenged software functions was a question of first impression. 1965 Although the plaintiffsconceded that all four challenged software functions were directed toward facilitating access tomaterials stored at the direction of users, they argued that Section 512(c) requires that the serviceprovider’s conduct be storage, and that the storage be at the direction of a user. The courtrejected this argument, finding that the safe harbor extends to functions other than mere storage,since the statutory language applies to “infringement of copyright by reason of the storage at thedirection of a user.” 1966 When copyrighted content was displayed or distributed on Veoh’ssystem it was by reason of or attributable to the fact that users uploaded the content to Veoh’s1962 Id. at 1155.1963 620 F. Supp. 2d 1081 (C.D. Cal. 2008).1964 Id. at 1083.1965 Id.1966 Id. at 1088 (emphasis added).- 424 -