Universal sues MySpace for copyright violations

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Universal's lawsuit raises obvious questions. If the suit succeeds, will all free services that let users freely post videos be in legal hot water too? What would that mean for other Web 2.0 sites?

The complaint charges that MySpace gives "its members tools to upload copies" of videos, thereby "providing means to viewers to disseminate" videos that infringe someone else's copyright.

But identical charges could be levied against practically every video-sharing site that doesn't prescreen user-generated clip--the list includes YouTube, of course, and Google Video, Grouper, Metacafe and VideoCodeZone.

What a federal court in the central district of California will evaluate is whether MySpace--and, by extension, similar file-sharing companies--can be held legally liable for users' copyright misdeeds.

The answer to that will depend on how judges interpret the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the Grokster file-swapping case. In that unanimous ruling last year (click for PDF), the justices indicated that copyright violations turn on fine points like whether the service is capable of substantial non-infringing use, and whether the defendant can block infringements and failed to do so.

Grokster and StreamCast could be held liable, the justices said, because there was evidence of "unequivocal indications of unlawful purpose" and because "neither company attempted to develop filtering tools or other mechanisms to diminish the infringing activity using their software."

Fast-antiquated law?
MySpace, on the other hand, will be able to point to its "fingerprinting technology" and other recent antipiracy measures as legal defenses.

Right now, sites that deal in user-submitted work contend that they aren't liable for their users' actions under the safe harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The provision was designed to protect sites that enable the public to communicate or conduct trade, without accepting liability for user misconduct. If they were to accept liability, proponents of the provision say businesses such as eBay and Craigslist would soon be overwhelmed by lawsuits.

Sites such as Google Video and YouTube remove infringing material once notified by a copyright holder. But nobody knows yet whether this is enough to satisfy the courts, says Mark Litvack, an entertainment attorney with Manatt, Phelps & Phillips.

Litvack says the question that the DMCA fails to answer is who has the obligation to protecting copyright materials: the copyright holder or the Web site owner.

"Does the copyright holder have to tell the site owner to take it down? Or does the site owner have to monitor the site?" asked Litvack.

The framers of the DMCA wrote the law before file-sharing or peer-to-peer technology emerged. "Nobody saw it coming," Litvack said. "The law was antiquated very quickly."

CNET News.com's Declan McCullagh contributed to this report.