ALKHOBAR, 15 May 2007 — As the Internet grows in popularity so does the problem of copyright infringement. Bitter battles are being fought as the courts attempt to balance the rights of the holders of intellectual property against the rights of individuals to use and share content online.
Last week, the Football Association Premier League Limited, the top league of English football, and independent US music publisher Borne Co. filed a class action lawsuit to stop the unauthorized and uncompensated use of their copyrighted works and those of all other similarly situated copyright holders on the YouTube.com website. The lawsuit names as defendants two YouTube affiliates, as well as YouTube’s corporate parent, Google, Inc.
According to the complaint filed in US District Court for the Southern District of New York: “Defendants are pursuing a deliberate strategy of engaging in, permitting, encouraging and facilitating massive copyright infringement on the YouTube website” in order to build traffic to the site. The complaint alleges that the YouTube defendants have long been aware of this pattern of massive infringement and yet purposefully refrain from employing readily available measures to curb it because the defendants understand that the popularity of YouTube.com and its value as a platform for other uses derive primarily from the ability of website visitors to access, view and otherwise exploit copyrighted materials without having to pay the owners of those materials.
The complaint further alleges that it was this very business model that persuaded defendant Google to pay $1.65 billion to purchase YouTube in November 2006, and that Google has endorsed and directed YouTube’s infringing conduct since becoming its corporate parent. States the complaint: “The $1.65 billion paid by Google to purchase YouTube in 2006, and the concomitant $4 billion increase in Google’s market capitalization, vastly understates both the value of the intellectual property rights of the Class that YouTube has misappropriated and the harm to the Class caused by Defendants’ unlawful conduct.”
The lawsuit seeks a court-ordered injunction to prohibit the defendants from continuing to violate various copyright protection laws. The lawsuit also asks for unspecified damages for YouTube’s past copyright violations. A copy of the complaint can be found at www.youtubeclassaction.com. The Premier League and Borne plan to prosecute this case as a class action on behalf of themselves and thousands of others whose copyrighted works have appeared on YouTube.com without permission.
It seems that the lawsuit may be a winner, as last week the lifestyle portal, MySpace, launched “Take Down Stay Down,” a feature for copyright holders that prevents users from re-posting video content in the MySpace community after that content has been removed at the request of the copyright owner. MySpace is the first Internet company to launch this type of content protection feature, which it is offering to all copyright owners free of charge. Take Down Stay Down is the latest addition to the company’s suite of solutions developed to help copyright owners protect their content on MySpace.com. The site offers other audio and video filtering tools as well.
“We have created this new feature to solve a problem that has long frustrated copyright holders and presented technical challenges to service providers — how to prevent copyrighted content from being reposted by the same or a different user after it has been taken down by the copyright owner,” said Michael Angus, EVP and General Counsel for Fox Interactive Media, the owners of MySpace.
By utilizing Take Down Stay Down, MySpace claims that it will be able to more efficiently and effectively implement its long-standing policy against users uploading third-party copyrighted material without permission. Take Down Stay Down utilizes a number of steps to ensure the content is identified, taken down and kept out of the MySpace community.
When a content owner informs MySpace that a user has improperly posted its content onto MySpace Videos, not only is the video promptly removed by MySpace, but MySpace also creates a digital fingerprint of the video content and adds it to its copyright filter.
If any user tries to upload the same content that has been removed, the filter will recognize the digital fingerprint and block the content from being uploaded. This way, when copyright owners remove content from MySpace, they will have greater assurance that it will stay down and not be reposted.
The move is certain to be unpopular with MySpace users, but it is doubtful that they can resist it. This was not the case for Digg.com. At the beginning of May, community news website Digg.com removed details posted at its site, concerning a software key that breaks the encryption on HD-DVDs. The action was taken after Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, received a “cease and desist” notice to either take down the information or face legal action. Digg is unlike traditional news websites in that editorial control is in the hands of users, who rank stories themselves.
Digg users were furious at the action and began reposting the information, overwhelming the site. Eventually the founder of Digg decided to stop attempting to remove the encryption information. In his blog he wrote: “If we lose ... at least we died trying.” Read his note in full at http://blog.digg.com/?p=74.
While Rose’s move pleased the Digg community, it’s a temporary victory.
Yesterday, when attempting to access the Digg website the following message appeared, “Digg will be down for a brief period, while we make some changes.” The reality is that Digg, YouTube and other online communities have no choice but to comply with rules protecting intellectual property rights or they’ll be down forever.