Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

Court Rules Against Universal Music in Veoh Case

Dena Cassella
By
universal-big
Image used with permission by copyright holder

U.S. District Judge Howard Matz on Friday dismissed the 2007 suit in which Universal accused Veoh of supporting and inducing copyright infringement.

Matz ruled that Veoh was taking reasonable steps to prevent and take down infringing videos uploaded by its users and that gave it protection from copyright suits in federal law.

Recommended Videos

Veoh CEO Dmitry Shapiro called the decision “a great victory.” The company noted that with the ruling, it expects to become profitable within the next two quarters.

Related

The lawsuit cost “many millions of dollars” to defend, money that would now be reinvested in the business, he said.

“We’ve been dragging a giant boulder on a chain. This frees us,” Shapiro said. “This lawsuit was simply Universal’s attempt to prevent innovation and shut down the company.”

Privately held Veoh was founded in 2004 and to date has raised $70 million from such investors as Shelter Capital Partners, Michael Eisner, Goldman Sachs, Time Warner Inc., Intel Corp. and Adobe Systems Inc.

Universal, a unit of France’s Vivendi SA, said it will appeal the decision to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, saying it runs counter to precedent and the intent of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act enacted in 1998.

“The balance between copyright holders and technology that Congress sought in enacting the DMCA has been upended by this decision,” Universal said in a statement.

Both companies engage in licensing deals with others to share advertising revenue generated from videos, highlighting the poor relationship at the heart of the dispute.

Settlement talks over the years have fizzled in acrimony.

“We never once had a business conversation with Universal Music Group. It was always about litigation,” said Joshua Metzger, Veoh’s general counsel and a senior vice president.

Veoh has licensing deals with major media companies including Viacom Inc., Time Warner Inc. and The Walt Disney Co.

It also has a licensing arrangement with Sony Corp.’s music entity, but not with either Warner Music Group Corp. or EMI Group PLC.

Universal has ad revenue-sharing deals with music streaming sites such as imeem and last.fm, as well as Google Inc.’s YouTube, with whom it is developing a free-to-watch online music video application called Vevo set to launch later this year.

Veoh now regularly takes down Universal artists’ music videos when given notice by the recording company.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Dena Cassella
Dena Cassella
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Haole built. O'ahu grown
YouTube purges extremist videos, from flat-earthers to Holocaust denial
youtube to remove more hateful and supremacist content going forward logo phone

YouTube announced further steps it plans to take toward reducing the amount of harmful content published on its site.

The video-sharing site published a statement on Wednesday, June 5, that outlined its plans to remove “more hateful and supremacist content” from its platform. Specifically targeting hate speech, the statement went on to say that YouTube’s updated video removal policy will include “prohibiting videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status. This would include, for example, videos that promote or glorify Nazi ideology, which is inherently discriminatory.”
In addition to removing videos that feature supremacist views, YouTube also intends to remove videos that deny the existence of “well-documented violent events, like the Holocaust or the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary.” The video publishing platform also said it would crack down on videos claiming the Earth is flat or promising miracle cures for diseases.
YouTube’s updated policies also include reducing the spread of content it deems “borderline” or more specifically, content that generally contains harmful false information such as “videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, or claiming the earth is flat.” But instead of removing borderline content, YouTube is opting to use a different approach to reduce the number of views borderline videos receive. Specifically, a system update that limits recommendations of that content in the first place. The system update was tested in the United States in January and YouTube intends to bring the update to more countries by the end of this year. YouTube also plans to increase the recommendations for content created by authoritative sources, like trusted news organizations.

Read more
How to create a bibliography in Word on Windows and Mac
A family using the computer to browse Fios internet together.

A bibliography is an important part of any well-structured college essay, dissertation, article, or other researched writing sample. It lets your readers know what sources you used as building blocks for your work, and isn’t too difficult to make without a template tool. Still, if you’d like to skip a few steps, there’s a terrific bibliography generator built right into Microsoft Word.

Read more
The unsung hero behind the modernization of Windows laptops
New Surface Laptop Studio 2 with a Surface Pen.

The large, multitouch trackpad was once synonymous with the MacBook. And starting in 2015, that has also included a haptic feedback trackpad, which simulates a physical click via a motorized engine under the surface. It was quite the revelation, and despite some initial skepticism, it really took off.

As you would expect, Apple held a patent on the technology, enjoying a five-year start ahead of other laptops. The first attempts at haptic feedback trackpads on Windows laptops weren't promising either.

Read more