Copyright infringements that occur on websites like YouTube don't leave them liable, the EU’s top court said Tuesday in a ruling that is expected to have wide-ranging implications for the creative sector.
LUXEMBOURG (CN) — The European Court of Justice held in a pair of cases on Tuesday that the video-sharing giant YouTube and file-hosting service Cyando were not responsible for user-uploaded content that violated copyright laws.
“The operator of a video-sharing platform or a file-hosting and ‑sharing platform, on which users can illegally make protected content available to the public, does not make a ‘communication to the public’ of that content … unless it contributes, beyond merely making that platform available, to giving access to such content to the public in breach of copyright,” the 17-judge panel found.
Both cases had been referred to the Luxembourg-based body by Germany's Bundesgerichtshof, the Federal Court of Justice, which sought clarification as to what responsibility online services have to copyright holders when their work is illegally placed on the service’s platform.
Music producer Frank Peterson brought the case against Google-owned YouTube. He sued the Silicon Valley company in 2008 over unauthorized copies of work he owned being uploaded to the site. In particular, Peterson wanted compensation for songs from British singer Sarah Brightman’s album "A Winter Symphony."
Dutch academic publishing giant Elsevier meanwhile had sued Cyando, seeking compensation for the copies "Gray’s Anatomy for Students" and "Campbell-Walsh Urology," among other titles, that had been illegally uploaded to now-defunct sites like Book Archive and RehabGate, which share textbooks and other academic publications for free.
The court found that both companies were exempt from liability. “The providers of the services concerned cannot ... be subject to a general obligation to monitor the information which they transmit or store or to a general obligation actively to look for facts or circumstances indicating illegal activity," according to the ruling by the court's Grand Chamber.
As for what responsibility YouTube does have, the judges said it must take steps to prevent copyrighted work from being uploaded to its site. Noting that the video-sharing site does tell users not to upload copyrighted work and uses a verification program to check for violations, the court stressed online platforms must remove copyrighted content “expeditiously” when made aware such content is on its site and attempt to prevent future infringements.
YouTube was involved in another copyright case before the court last year. In that dispute, which also originated in Germany, the court held that YouTube only had to hand over some information about users who uploaded copyright-violating content to the platform.
The court stressed that any national regulations over how copyright claims are pursued must “strike a fair balance between, on the one hand, the protection of the intellectual property right enjoyed by those rights holders ... and, on the other, the right to the freedom to conduct a business enjoyed by service providers ... and the right to freedom of expression and of information.”
The Grand Chamber left it for the German court to decide if YouTube and Cynado had taken appropriate precautions.
According to court documents, several hundred thousand videos are uploaded each day onto the YouTube platform, amounting to 35 hours of video per minute.
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