Quickthink

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There was pretty major legal tech news yesterday from a federal court in California that entered a summary judgment on claims against a web based video sharing service called Veoh. TechCrunch offers a digital copy of the judgment. This is just one judgmnet by a trial level court, and does not offer any definitive guidance to all on DMCA issues. But a few ideas are worth noting.

The fact that the court did not let the case proceed to trial is significant. The court rejected the legal theories offered by the plaintiff that (1) the service provider had an obligation to track terminated users, and (2) the service provider allegedly lost protection of the DMCA by automatically sorting content as it was uploaded. My take is that these arguments were bogus anyway, and it would be great if other courts follow Veoh on these points if they come up again.

Veoh does not set a minimum standard for complying with the DMCA. The Veoh court only assessed what was before it. On the other hand, a service provider that mimics the Veoh system might feel more comfortable that at least one judge would find its system to be in compliance.

Veoh shows that complying with the DMCA may not be that hard. Some of the language in the judgment is very helpful for service providers trying to figure out what the DMCA is all about. According to the court, the DMCA promotes a reasonable degree of cooperation with copyright holders rather than setting a strict set of rules that could be a trap for the unwary.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 30th, 2008 at 10:06 am and is filed under Law, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.