Does an online service provider forfeit the safe harbor protections of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act if, when terminating the account of a repeat infringer, it does not delete all content the repeat infringer uploaded — infringing and noninfringing alike? A recent decision involving the antique internet technology Usenet sheds light on an answer.
Active copyright plaintiff Perfect 10 sued Usenet provider Giganews for direct and secondary liability for hosting allegedly infringing materials on the Giganews servers. Giganews asserted the safe harbor of the DMCA (17 U.S.C. 512) as an affirmative defense. Perfect 10 moved for summary judgment on whether the safe harbor applied – it argued that the safe harbor did not apply, Giganews argued that it did. The court denied Perfect 10’s motion.
Perfect 10 asserted that Giganews had not reasonably implemented a policy to terminate the accounts of repeat infringers as required by 17 U.S.C. 512 (i)(1)(A). One of the arguments Perfect 10 made was that Giganews did not reasonably implement its repeat infringer policy because Giganews terminated the accounts of the infringers but did not also delete all the content the infringers had uploaded.
The court was not persuaded that § 512(i)(1)(A) requires a service provider to disable or delete all content a repeat infringer has ever posted. The plain language of the statute requires “termination … of subscribers and account holders,” not the deletion of content. And because a requirement of taking down all content, not just infringing content, would serve no infringement-preventing purpose, the court held that there was no justification for reading such a requirement into the statute.
Perfect 10, Inc. v. Giganews, Inc., — F.Supp.2d —, 2014 WL 323655 (C.D.Cal. January 29, 2014)