By Eric Auchard
The California court dismissed a copyright infringement
suit by adult entertainment company Io Group Inc against Veoh
and granted summary judgment to the defendants. The complaint
argued Veoh had not done enough to stop site users of its site
from uploading unauthorized clips of ten Io adult sex films.
Judge Howard Lloyd of the U.S. District Court for the
Northern District of California found that Veoh worked actively
to protect copyright owners and so qualified for "safe harbor"
protections of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
"The DMCA was intended to facilitate the growth of
electronic commerce, not squelch it," the judge said in siding
with Veoh.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) limits
liability for Internet service providers that act quickly to
block access to pirated online materials, once the copyright
holder notifies a Web site of specific acts of infringement.
The ruling draws a line between Napster, the music-sharing
service that enabled a wave of music piracy early this decade,
and the new crop of video sharing services that take steps to
protect against piracy of copyrighted materials.
Io had argued that Veoh should be required to prescreen
videos to prevent copyright infringement. "The court finds no
reasonable juror could conclude that a comprehensive review of
every file would be feasible," the judge wrote.
The court rejected a technical argument used in many
Internet copyright cases in which Io claimed Veoh infringed its
copyrights by automatically converting user-submitted videos
into easy-to-watch Flash videos, a process called transcoding.
But Lloyd stressed that he does not intend his decision to
open the flood gates of Internet video piracy.
"The decision rendered here is confined to the particular
combination of facts in this case and is not intended to push
the bounds of the safe harbor so wide that less than scrupulous
service providers may claim its protection," Lloyd wrote.
Among other issues with Io's lawsuit, the judge noted that
Io had filed a lawsuit against Veoh instead of first providing
the video company with notification of infringement.
Veoh had decided to bar all adult sexual content from its
site and taken down the infringing Io videos before the suit
was filed, Lloyd noted.
"We are very happy that the judge in this case recognized
our compliance with the DMCA and our efforts to respect
copyrights," Veoh spokesman Gaude Lydia Paez said.
The Io-Veoh case featured similar arguments to those used
in two high-profile cases against Google Inc unit YouTube, the
world's most popular video sharing site.
Viacom Inc filed a $1 billion lawsuit in 2007 against
YouTube calling it a site for "massive intentional copyright
infringement" that had enabled hundreds of thousands of Viacom
video clips to be pirated. A second suit filed against YouTube
by English soccer's Premier League and more than a dozen
sports, entertainment and media plaintiffs is running in
parallel in a New York federal court.
YouTube Chief Counsel Zahavah Levine hailed the Veoh ruling
in a statement, saying that: "It is great to see the court
confirm that the DMCA protects services like YouTube that
follow the law and respect copyrights."
Veoh ranked last week as the 17th most visited U.S.
multimedia entertainment site according to Web measurement firm
Hitwise Inc. Financial backers include former Walt Disney Co
Chief Executive Michael Eisner, former Viacom and MTV Networks
CEO Tom Freston, former Viacom Entertainment Group CEO Jonathan
Dolgen and investment bank Goldman Sachs.
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