Could the decision to throw out a copyright infringement case against Veoh have an impact on the $1 billion lawsuit Viacom is currently pursuing against YouTube?

The U.S. District Court has dismissed a copyright infringement case in which Io Group alleged Veoh had broken the law by the use of its transcoding method.

DMCA Takedowns Not Sufficient?

Io Group, an adult entertainment company, launched the lawsuit back in 2006 after some of its pornographic material ended up on Veoh due to being uploaded by a user.

Io Group first sent DMCA takedown notices, which were duly and very quickly honoured with the removal of the videos. But that wasn’t enough and it sued Veoh anyway.

Stephanie Lenz is a tough woman. Not content with merely getting Universal to retract its unnecessary takedown notice over a YouTube video she uploaded, she went ahead and sued the, for it too.

Last month saw Universal Music, which had issued the DMCA notice over 30 seconds of a Prince song playing in the background of a baby dancing, claim that “fair use is infringing”.

Now, as discussed here by Sherwin Siy of Public Knowledge, the judge in the case has refused to dismiss her lawsuit, essentially backing her claims that the clip was fair use, and should have been left alone.

Of Dancing Babies and Overzealous Takedowns: When “fair use is hard!” doesn’t cut it

Yesterday, a federal district court in San Jose refused to dismiss a suit brought against Universal Music for improperly demanding that YouTube remove a home video from its site.

In this case, Stephanie Lenz was sent a takedown notice for posting a home video on YouTube. Lenz had made a video of her toddler stumbling through her kitchen, then hearing and bobbing to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy,” which was playing tinnily in the background on a countertop stereo. 

Despite the obvious fair use of the work, Universal sent a takedown notice to YouTube anyway. YouTube took the video down and notified Lenz that she had been accused of infringing copyright. After Lenz consulted a lawyer and issued a counter-notice, the video was put up again some six weeks later. After this, Lenz sued Universal.

What happens when the IOC runs to the authorities rather than approaching the pirates themselves? A round of pure and utter taunting, that’s what.

The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games are currently taking place in China, as everyone but the most ignorant will be well aware. And this Olympics has seen more ways of watching coverage of the Games than ever before.

Many Ways Of Watching Olympic Coverage

As well as the licensed coverage on traditional television and officially sanctioned online coverage by the likes of the BBC and NBC, there are also plenty of less than legal ways of watching the highlights.

One of these is via torrents on sites such as The Pirate Bay, a site which hasn’t gone unnoticed by the IOC (International Olympic Committee), the organisation trying to ensure only those who are meant to sharing videos of events are doing so.

Could monetizing rather than removing copyrighted clips prove to be a solution to both the ‘Viacom issue’ and YouTube’s failure to earn the money that its traffic suggests should be possible.

The Viacom Lawsuit

The problem of copyrighted clips appearing on YouTube is a long-standing and controversial one. The problem so irritated Viacom that it launched a $1 billion lawsuit against the company.

Part of that lawsuit suggested that YouTube didn’t do enough to prevent copyrighted video from appearing on the site, and that once it did, not enough was done to remove it.

Video ID System

This lead YouTube to introduce the Video ID system last year which allowed content owners to quickly and easily check the digital fingerprints of their material with videos uploaded to YouTube.

If a company finds a match then it has the option to issue a DMCA takedown to have the offending video removed from the site. But there is another option, and it’s one that is growing in popularity amongst media companies.

In this digital age that we are now on the verge of, content producers are having to ensure their rights are protected. But do their arguments sometimes go too far?

Cablevision recently won a court case against content producers who had accused the company of breaking copyright laws by the use of a Tivo-like remote DVR.

We’ve already heard from Sherwin Siy how the appeal court’s decision was correct, and constituted a victory for home recording. Here, he discusses the wider implications related to buffering for all video streaming sites.

Why the Cablevision Decision Matters

In my post from Monday, I laid out a very brief outline of some of the conclusions reached by the Second Circuit in its Cablevision decision on remote DVRs. Today, I want to take a step back and discuss why it was so important for the development of digital media and technology.

Two theories espoused by the TV networks in the case were extraordinarily dangerous for copyright law. The first was that fleeting, transitory copies like buffer copies could make someone liable for copyright infringement. The second was that the provider of a product or service could be directly liable for infringement when the actual copying was done by someone else entirely.

Buffer Copies

Rashmi’s talked about the buffer copy theory in relation to the Copyright Office’s section 115 rulemaking, but I think it’s still worth mentioning the basics: A buffer copy is a copy that is made in the course of digital transfer. It’s not intended to be directly viewed, accessed, or used by anyone. It’s just a step in the relay of information from one source to another. 

Trying to count this as a “copy” in the sense of copyright law makes little sense. In the end, whether the process used to get a streaming video from a server to my PC makes two or two thousand buffer copies in the process, it doesn’t matter (for copyright purposes—let’s ignore system resources for now) to me, the sender, or the copyright owner. 

Are the big television networks finally getting a grasp on the digital age and what the Web means for their business? If NBC’s coverage of the Beijing 2008 opening ceremony is anything to go by, they still have a lot to learn.

NBC’s coverage of the Beijing 2008 Olympics has hit piracy issues on the first day of the Games. And it’s all because the TV network decided to delay broadcasting the opening ceremony for 12 hours.

Advertising Revenue Delay

The reason NBC did this was purely down to money - the opening ceremony started at 5am U.S. time, and this just wouldn’t bring in the advertising revenue that a prime time slot of 5pm would.

This kind of strategy would have been fine even just four years ago during the last Olympic Games. But times have changed, and the Web now offers people global access to events like this, live, unfettered, and not dependent on advertisers demands.

Does the use of off-site DVRs, which work like a TiVo, infringe the copyrights of content providers such as American TV networks? A federal appeals court thinks not.

Here, Sherwin Siy of Public Knowledge discusses the case, the positive decision, and how the result is a victory for digital technologies and common sense.

Victory for Home Recording in Cablevision Remote DVR Case

On August 4, a federal appeals court ruled that Cablevision’s remote DVRs - which worked like off-site TiVos - didn’t infringe copyright. The decision, which overturns an earlier district court opinion, stated that there was no significant legal difference between the remote DVRs and a VCR. An all-too-brief summary of the history and findings follows.

The original case arose out of Cablevision’s creation and marketing of the “RS-DVR,” a service that, like a TiVo, let cable subscribers select different TV shows to be recorded digitally onto a hard drive. Unlike a TiVo, however, the hard drives of the RS-DVR are stored on Cablevision property.