US Hosting Provider Denied Liability for Client’s Infringement
https://sp-security.blogspot.com/2017/02/us-hosting-provider-denied-liability.html
Adult
publisher ALS Scan sued a hosting company from Chicago, claiming that
the latter is responsible for the actions of its client ImageBam.
However, the hosting company, Steadfast, argues that it's protected by
the DMCA's safe harbor.
It is an eternal mantra of copyright holders that the third-party Internet services are responsible for actions of pirates, even though they didn’t infringe anything themselves but merely provided their services to pirates. The copyright owners believe that search engines, Internet service providers, domain name registrars, hosting providers, advertisers and other intermediaries should all do more to prevent online piracy.
As such, adult entertainment publisher ALS Scan took several third-party services to court – in particular, advertising network JuicyAds, CDN provider CloudFlare, and a number of hosting providers, Steadfast being one of them. The latter refused to take on the liability and asked the court to dismiss the case, pointing out that it was protected by the DMCA’s safe harbor provisions. The company explained that it didn’t operate or manage the pirate website or communicate with its individual users – instead, the hosting provider only offers computer storage.
In response, ALS Scan insists that Steadfast should have stopped the copyright infringements on ImageBam and cannot hide behind “safe harbor” protection because of its failure to enforce a repeat infringer policy. The adult publisher also claims that the hosting provider financially benefited from the draw of infringement on the website of its client, and thus could not claim DMCA safe harbors. In its turn, Steadfast argued that the repeat infringer argument couldn’t be applied here, because the company was not able to control the actions of ImageBam users, among other things.
The District Court will soon decide which side is right in this situation, but it must be said that aside from Steadfast, a few other defendants, including CloudFlare, are also trying to turn the case in their favor. Although ALS Scan is not a major copyright owner, this case may appear vital for many online services in the US, because an entire industry can be put at risk if a service provider loses its safe harbor protection.
Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.
It is an eternal mantra of copyright holders that the third-party Internet services are responsible for actions of pirates, even though they didn’t infringe anything themselves but merely provided their services to pirates. The copyright owners believe that search engines, Internet service providers, domain name registrars, hosting providers, advertisers and other intermediaries should all do more to prevent online piracy.
As such, adult entertainment publisher ALS Scan took several third-party services to court – in particular, advertising network JuicyAds, CDN provider CloudFlare, and a number of hosting providers, Steadfast being one of them. The latter refused to take on the liability and asked the court to dismiss the case, pointing out that it was protected by the DMCA’s safe harbor provisions. The company explained that it didn’t operate or manage the pirate website or communicate with its individual users – instead, the hosting provider only offers computer storage.
In response, ALS Scan insists that Steadfast should have stopped the copyright infringements on ImageBam and cannot hide behind “safe harbor” protection because of its failure to enforce a repeat infringer policy. The adult publisher also claims that the hosting provider financially benefited from the draw of infringement on the website of its client, and thus could not claim DMCA safe harbors. In its turn, Steadfast argued that the repeat infringer argument couldn’t be applied here, because the company was not able to control the actions of ImageBam users, among other things.
The District Court will soon decide which side is right in this situation, but it must be said that aside from Steadfast, a few other defendants, including CloudFlare, are also trying to turn the case in their favor. Although ALS Scan is not a major copyright owner, this case may appear vital for many online services in the US, because an entire industry can be put at risk if a service provider loses its safe harbor protection.
Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.
