Important DMCA copyright decision

Wired's Threat Level Blog reports on an important copyright decision out of the US:

Online video-sharing sites are scoring another major legal victory, as a federal judge is ruling that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects such sites from copyright violations if they abide by takedown notices as the DMCA prescribes.

The case was brought by Universal Music Group, which claimed that San Diego-based Veoh -- financially backed by Time Warner and Michael Eisner – engaged in wanton copyright infringement because it allowed users to upload and store the music concern's copyrighted videos. U.S. District Judge Howard Matz agreed with Veoh that its business model complied with the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act's so-called safe harbor provisions.

The case is similar to other suits targeting YouTube, MySpace, MP3Tunes and others. And it marks just the second time that a federal judge has ruled the DMCA protects video-sharing sites – even user-generated sites like Veoh that transform user-uploaded content into flash-formatted videos that can later be accessed by users.

...

Both rulings are not binding on other judges, however. And neither the U.S. appellate courts nor the U.S. Supreme Court has directly addressed the issue.

Check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation's take by Fred von Lohmann on the topic.

Read more here.

Comments

[eBuster]

Yes eBay just got my site took down at www.eBuster.co.uk because it links back to scammer accounts on eBay so people can see the scams for themselves what these people are doing and it also contained copies of many pages I had preserved because eBay has a habit of trying to hide pages in an effort to prevent the course of justice.

The site also contains millions of eBay member names that can be searched but I’m not sure if that come under copyright law or not as it is possible to search member for member names from Google that gives you links directly into eBay accounts.

I think my best bet is to take a leaf out of eBays book which is to side step many laws here in the UK including the FSA by having eBays registered office in Luxemburg so maybe I need to look offshore myself for my service provider.

Maybe it’s becoming against the law to expose fraud on eBay as the only way I can see anyone making a case is by linking to eBay pages themselves or by taking static copied of pages but it seems both are prohibited under DMCA rules and eBay certainly seems to have their way with the law here in the UK when it comes to the Birmingham police and trading standards who point blank refuse to except concrete evidence linking a fraudster to no less than eight eBay accounts being used to sell death traps as cars.

What seems to have really have upset eBay was a fake login page hosted by about.ebay.com that I exposed on my site by taking a copy of the page and adding in big red text that not to used the page as it was a fake.

Any advise would be appreciated before I decide how I should go about hosting the site that is dedicated to exposing multiple frauds on eBay that eBay is turning a blind eye towards.