Veoh: Not Guilty! A Great Day For Online Video

This NYTimes blog post by Miguel Helft reports o n the implications of the decision by Federal Court that Veoh is NOT GUILTY of copyright infringement for videos that were posted by users. The case had been filed by IO Entertainment, an adult company that owns gay adult film maker Titan Media.

The decision does not say that online video sites can sit back and pretend they don't notice when consumers post copyrighted material but rather that Veoh had made good faith efforts to prevent copyright infringement.

“Far from encouraging copyright infringement, Veoh has a strong DMCA policy, takes active steps to limit incidents of infringement on its website and works diligently to keep unauthorized works off its site,” Magistrate Judge Howard Lloyd, of the U.S. District Court in San Jose, wrote in the decision.

The case has implications on another case between Viacom and YouTube over the same issue. Or so says YouTube. Viacom has other views:

But in a statement, Viacom said the ruling did not weaken its case against Google: “Even if the Veoh decision were to be considered by other courts, that case does nothing to change the fact that YouTube is a business built on infringement that has failed to take reasonable measures to respect the rights of creators and content owners. Google and YouTube have engaged in massive copyright infringement – conduct that is not protected by any law, including the DMCA.”Oh, them's fightin' words.

Here's what Tech Crunch had to say about the Veoh argument:

A key issue of the case turned on whether or not Veoh should lose DMCA safe harbor protection because they transcoded user uploaded videos to the Flash format, something every online Flash video site does as a matter of course.

IO Group argued that the transcoding made Veoh a direct infringer and that the materials were under their direct control. Lloyd disagreed, saying “Here, Veoh has simply established a system whereby software automatically processes user-submitted content and recasts it in a format that is readily accessible to its users. Veoh preselects the software parameters for the process from a range of default values set by the thirdparty software…ButVeoh does not itself actively participate or supervise the uploading of files. Nor does it preview or select the files before the upload is completed. Instead, video files are uploaded through an automated process which is initiated entirely at the volition of Veoh’s users.”

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