Following on from Kevin's recent post about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the US, The Register reports on a new claim filed by the Motion Picture Association of America against YouTV and Peekvid under the comparably ancient US Copyright Act 1976.
The MPAA claims that the sites' "sole purpose... is to disseminate content that has been illegally reproduced and distributed" - and presumably, therefore, that they are guilty of copyright infringement in relation to content they did not create. In particular they "contribute to and profit from massive copyright infringement by identifying, posting, organizing and indexing links to infringing content found on the internet".
Sounds like they are trying to emulate the controversial Grokster/Streamcast decision of a couple of years ago. In that case, the US courts found that the sites were actively promoting illegal filesharing. Quite whether the MPAA can prove that YouTV and Peekvid were doing the same remains to be seen.
Interestingly, one judge in the Grokster case stated that products used "almost exclusively to infringe copyrights" may also be caught - it will be interesting to see if the MPAA case provides any further guidance on this. And, of course, to what extent the sites in question are protected under the DMCA.
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