Viacom lives to fight another day against YouTube.   The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed a trial court ruling which summarily dismissed Viacom’s copyright infringement claims against YouTube. Viacom and the other joint plaintiffs in the action sued YouTube in 2007 for copyright infringement of approximately 75,000 video clips.   After discovery, both sides moved for summary judgment.  The trial court ruled that YouTube was protected from any copyright infringement claims based […]

Perfect 10 is a website which sells subscriptions to view its collection of nude photographs. The photographs are in a password protected area of the Perfect 10 website and are not publicly available.  Certain third party websites copied Perfect 10’s photographs and republished them on the internet without permission.  Once the photographs are on the public internet, Google indexes these third party websites and creates a thumbnail image of the photograph which it retains in […]

Several years before Google, Apple, and Amazon released their digital locker services for storing music, MP3tunes offered a similar service — and was promptly sued by major record labels including Capitol Records.  As we await the court’s decision now is a good time to recap the arguments made by both sides as well as the two Amicus briefs filed by Google and the Motion Picture Association of America.  Regardless of how the court decides an […]