The Veoh Ruling Comes Down in Favor of Distribution

Is a website liable for infringing on copyrights if it distributes (unwittingly and without intent) copyrighted material without consent of the owner? A recent ruling in the veoh case by a federal court in Northern California has decided in favor of the websites.

Here's the summary of the decision: The sites must...

• Provide adequate notice to users that uploading copyrighted material is prohibited
• Swiftly comply with DMCA takedown notices “on the same day the notice is received (or within a few days thereafter).”
• Use fingerprinting and other technology to detect copyrighted material, even if the methods are flawed.
• Take measures to control infringing users. Specifically, infringing accounts need to be terminated and the email banned from any new accounts. The court held that IP address banning was not necessary: “…Io has presented no evidence suggesting that tracking (or verifying) users’ actual identity or that blocking their IP addresses is a more effective reasonable means of implementation.”
• Transcoding files to Flash format does not put the files in the site’s control; they are still protected by the DMCA safe harbor.
• Sites are encouraged to spot check videos, and if they do, to remove content that is likely infringing.
• Sites are NOT required to check every video. The court said “this court finds no reasonable juror could conclude that a comprehensive review of every file would be feasible. Even if such a review were feasible, there is no assurance that Veoh could have accurately identified the infringing content in question.”
• It’s important to have lots of non-infringing content. The court noted that Veoh had received DMCA notices on only about 7% of its content. This helped its argument that it was different than Napster, which “existed solely to provide the site and facilities for copyright infringement…the sole purpose of the Napster program was to provide a forum for easy copyright infringement.”