Effect Of Veoh Decision On YouTube/Viacom Case Unclear

YouTube is cheering a new decision dismissing a copyright infringement lawsuit against Veoh Networks that is similar to a battle it's fighting against Viacom. But not everyone thinks the ruling will hurt Viacom in its $1 billion lawsuit against the video-sharing site.
In the Veoh case, a federal magistrate in San Jose, Calif. threw out a lawsuit brought by adult entertainment company Io Group. The court found that the video-sharing site was protected from liability by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The extent of that law's protections are key to several pending cases by traditional media companies against sites that rely on user-generated content including, most famously, Viacom's lawsuit against Google's YouTube.
At issue in the Veoh case were Io clips that users had uploaded to the video-sharing site without authorization. Io argued that Veoh should have done more to police its site, but Veoh countered that it was protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's safe harbor provisions. Those protections generally give companies immunity from liability for copyright infringement as long as they remove pirated material posted by users upon request.
Federal magistrate Howard Lloyd agreed with Veoh's interpretation and ruled that the federal statute does not require companies to screen user-submitted content in advance. "Plaintiff's suggestion that Veoh must be required to reduce or limit its business operations is contrary to one of the stated goals of the DMCA," he wrote. "The DMCA was intended to facilitate the growth of electronic commerce, not squelch it."
Viacom's lawsuit is pending in federal court in New York, and the judge in the case is not legally required to follow the ruling of the San Jose court. But the judge in the YouTube case might still be persuaded by another judge's reasoning in a similar lawsuit.
Not surprisingly, YouTube immediately cheered the decision. "It is great to see the Court confirm that the DMCA protects services," the company said in a statement.
For its part, Viacom said in a statement that it still thought YouTube was liable for copyright infringement. "Even if the Veoh decision were to be considered by other courts, that case does nothing to change the fact that YouTube is a business built on infringement that has failed to take reasonable measures to respect the rights of creators and content owners. Google and YouTube have engaged in massive copyright infringement -- conduct that is not protected by any law, including the DMCA."
Some bloggers and industry observers, including the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the decision seemed to bolster YouTube.
Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University, was among those who thought the court's reasoning could bode poorly for Viacom. "It's terrific news for YouTube," he said.
Goldman added that the court's rejection of the proposition that Veoh should have instituted measures to prevented pirated clips from ever appearing on the site is especially significant. "Can plaintiffs tell defendants how to run their business? This court's saying, 'Definitely not.'"
Another portion of the ruling that could help YouTube deals with the site's transcoding of videos into Flash. Lloyd held that automatically converting the clips into Flash doesn't deprive Veoh of immunity. "Veoh is not precluded from safe harbor ... by virtue of its automated processing of user-submitted content," he wrote.
Still, not everyone agrees that this case offers powerful support for Google's video-sharing site. "It's a factually different situation," said Bruce Boyden, an assistant law professor at Marquette.
One of the most significant dissimilarities is that Io never notified Veoh about the infringing clips. On the contrary, the first time Veoh learned of the alleged piracy was when it was served with the lawsuit.
But Viacom complained numerous times to YouTube about alleged copyright infringement on the site. YouTube has responded by taking down particular clips, but the problem is that users continued to upload new copies.
"Viacom, unlike Io, has been sending tons of Section 512 takedown notices to YouTube. The question there is going to be, what does YouTube have to do after it gets those notices other than just pulling down the one file that's complained about?" Boyden said.
Additionally, Lloyd noted in his ruling that Veoh did everything possible to prevent piracy. "Perhaps most importantly, there is no indication that Veoh has failed to police its system to the fullest extent permitted by its architecture," Lloyd wrote.
But one of Viacom's allegations against YouTube is that, prior to late 2007, the site had copyright infringement detection tools but made them available only to partners. If that's true, the decision in Veoh is not especially helpful to YouTube, Boyden said.

Amazon rainforest was giant garden city

Amazon rainforest was covered by a vast sprawl of interconnected villages between 1,500 and 500 years ago, according to a study that shows how nature has felt the impact of man for much longer than realised.
Explorers have long sought lost cities of the Amazon, now almost entirely obscured by forest. Today it turns out that the "garden cities", which date back 1500 years, were too spread out to make sense of on foot.

Aerial shot of an Amazon village showing central plaza and the roads radiating from the centre
Assisted by satellite imagery, researchers have spent more than a decade uncovering and mapping the lost and obscured communities to show they held more than 1000 people each and were once large and complex enough to be considered "urban" as the term is commonly applied to medieval European and ancient Greek communities.
In the Xingu region of the Brazilian Amazon, these garden cities radiated out over a diameter of 150 miles, covering an area of 18,000 square miles that exceeds the sprawl of Los Angeles by 35 fold.
However, they only held around 50,000 people, compared with the 13 million in LA.
The extraordinary conclusion is reached by anthropologists from the University of Florida and Brazil, and a member of the Kuikuro, an indigenous people who are the descendants of the settlements' original inhabitants.
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"If we look at your average medieval town or your average Greek polis, most are about the scale of those we find in this part of the Amazon," said Prof Mike Heckenberger of the University of Florida, lead author of the paper published today in the journal Science.
"Only the ones we find are much more complicated in terms of their planning."
The paper also argues that the size and scale of the settlements in the southern Amazon in North Central Brazil means that what many scientists consider virgin tropical forests were shaped by human activity hundreds of years ago.
Not only that, but the settlements - consisting of networks of walled towns and smaller villages, each organised around a central plaza - suggest future solutions for supporting the indigenous population in Brazil's state of Mato Grosso and other regions of the Amazon, the paper says.
Around the communities the scientists found dams and artificial ponds that indicate the then inhabitants farmed fish, which today could be a valuable new food resource.
Prof Heckenberger and his colleagues first announced the discovery of the first settlements in 2003, revealing the largest date from around 1250 to 1650, when European colonists and the diseases they brought likely killed most of their inhabitants.
The communities are now almost entirely overgrown. But Prof Heckenberger said that members of the Kuikuro, a Xinguano tribe that calls the region home, are adept at identifying tell-tale signs of old settlements, from "dark earth" that indicate past human waste dumps or farming, concentrations of pottery shards and earthworks.
The new paper reports that the settlements consisted of clusters of 150-acre towns and smaller villages organised in spread out "galactic" patterns.
None of the large towns was as large as the largest medieval or Greek towns. But as with those towns, the Amazonian ones were surrounded by large walls - in their case, composed of earthworks still extant today.
Each settlement had an identical formal road, always oriented northeast to southwest in keeping with the mid-year summer solstice, connected to a central plaza.
The findings are important because they contradict long-held stereotypes about early Western versus early New World settlements that rest on the idea that "if you find it in Europe, it's a city.
If you find it somewhere else, it has to be something else," Prof Heckenberger said. "They have quite remarkable planning."
Because it means at least one area of "pristine" Amazon has a long history of human activity, the find could change not only how scientists assess the flora and fauna, but also how conservationists preserve the remains of forest so heavily cleared it is the world's largest soybean producing area. Explorers have long sought lost cities of the Amazon, now almost entirely obscured by forest. Today it turns out that the "garden cities", which date back 1500 years, were too spread out to make sense of on foot.

Aerial shot of an Amazon village showing central plaza and the roads radiating from the centre
Assisted by satellite imagery, researchers have spent more than a decade uncovering and mapping the lost and obscured communities to show they held more than 1000 people each and were once large and complex enough to be considered "urban" as the term is commonly applied to medieval European and ancient Greek communities.
In the Xingu region of the Brazilian Amazon, these garden cities radiated out over a diameter of 150 miles, covering an area of 18,000 square miles that exceeds the sprawl of Los Angeles by 35 fold.
However, they only held around 50,000 people, compared with the 13 million in LA.
The extraordinary conclusion is reached by anthropologists from the University of Florida and Brazil, and a member of the Kuikuro, an indigenous people who are the descendants of the settlements' original inhabitants.
advertisement
"If we look at your average medieval town or your average Greek polis, most are about the scale of those we find in this part of the Amazon," said Prof Mike Heckenberger of the University of Florida, lead author of the paper published today in the journal Science.
"Only the ones we find are much more complicated in terms of their planning."
The paper also argues that the size and scale of the settlements in the southern Amazon in North Central Brazil means that what many scientists consider virgin tropical forests were shaped by human activity hundreds of years ago.
Not only that, but the settlements - consisting of networks of walled towns and smaller villages, each organised around a central plaza - suggest future solutions for supporting the indigenous population in Brazil's state of Mato Grosso and other regions of the Amazon, the paper says.
Around the communities the scientists found dams and artificial ponds that indicate the then inhabitants farmed fish, which today could be a valuable new food resource.
Prof Heckenberger and his colleagues first announced the discovery of the first settlements in 2003, revealing the largest date from around 1250 to 1650, when European colonists and the diseases they brought likely killed most of their inhabitants.
The communities are now almost entirely overgrown. But Prof Heckenberger said that members of the Kuikuro, a Xinguano tribe that calls the region home, are adept at identifying tell-tale signs of old settlements, from "dark earth" that indicate past human waste dumps or farming, concentrations of pottery shards and earthworks.
The new paper reports that the settlements consisted of clusters of 150-acre towns and smaller villages organised in spread out "galactic" patterns.
None of the large towns was as large as the largest medieval or Greek towns. But as with those towns, the Amazonian ones were surrounded by large walls - in their case, composed of earthworks still extant today.
Each settlement had an identical formal road, always oriented northeast to southwest in keeping with the mid-year summer solstice, connected to a central plaza.
The findings are important because they contradict long-held stereotypes about early Western versus early New World settlements that rest on the idea that "if you find it in Europe, it's a city.
If you find it somewhere else, it has to be something else," Prof Heckenberger said. "They have quite remarkable planning."
Because it means at least one area of "pristine" Amazon has a long history of human activity, the find could change not only how scientists assess the flora and fauna, but also how conservationists preserve the remains of forest so heavily cleared it is the world's largest soybean producing area.