English Premier League launches class action against YouTube

by Stephen Withers

Tuesday, 08 May 2007

The English Premier League and music publisher Bourne have filed a class action in a US federal court against YouTube and Google, alleging "a deliberate strategy of engaging in, permitting, encouraging, and facilitating massive copyright infringement on the YouTube website".

Google and YouTube's motives are said to be that "the presence of large amounts of valuable intellectual property generates interest in that website, resulting in public and media attention and increased traffic (which, in turn increase YouTube's advertising revenues and projected value as a site, platform or destination)".

The suit further alleges "feigned blindness" on the defendants' part, and that they "deliberately refrained from implementing readily available technical measures to prevent infringement" as that would reduce their audience.

YouTube's deals with rightsholders are likened to a protection racket, in that technological measures are allegedly only deployed to protect those copyright owners that offer a licence at a sufficiently low fee.

"Essentially, YouTube's strategy has been to compensate only those copyright owners that it believes actually have the financial wherewithal to pursue legal remedies against it", the suit claims.

As in the Viacom case, the English Premier League and Bourne allege that YouTube claims to actively police content for offensive or pornographic material, but refuses to do the same for copyright infringement.

The English Premier League is arguably the world's leading national football (soccer) competition. It attracts many of the world's best players and its matches are broadcast in 204 countries to an estimated audience of 2.59 billion.

The class action seeks, among other things, an injunction on direct or indirect copyright infringement, the broad use of technological measures to prevent the posting of copyright material, the "disgorgement" of any illegal profits, punitive damages, costs and the usual "other and further relief as the Court may deem just and proper."

Class actions are typically launched by groups of individuals seeking redress against a corporation (eg, over a faulty product) or government (eg, the US government's "no-fly" blacklist).

The basic idea is to avoid the repetitious hearing of similar cases, and to make it possible for individuals suffering relatively small yet real disadvantage to obtain legal redress.

In this case, the class is (loosely) defined as the owners of copyrights or other relevant exclusive rights to material "that without authorization, was reproduced, adapted distributed, publicly displayed, performed, or otherwise transmitted or disseminated on or through the YouTube.com website".

One or more copyright holders could, at least in theory, launch an action against the class of individuals they allege had posted infringing clips on YouTube. However, the record industry's attempts to sue individuals for small-scale copyright infringement resulted in negative PR, so it isn't surprising that these rightsholders are going after YouTube rather than its user community.{moscomment}