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Legal
EMI sue Vimeo
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 18 December 2009
EMI are suing YouTube competitors Vimeo for copyright infringement, over allegations the video site encourages users to upload videos of themselves lip syncing to songs, even though the video service, unlike YouTube, does not have any licencing agreements with the record companies or music publishers. The major’s lawsuit claims that even Vimeo staff have uploaded said unlicensed lip syncing vids.
EMI’s litigation says this: “The lawsuit is about a commercial, for-profit venture that has built a business by reproducing, adapting, performing, and distributing works that it knows contain the plaintiff’s copyrighted recordings, and then knowingly profiting from the draw created by making these works available for free to millions of its users”.
I think Vimeo say that they remove any copyright infringing videos as soon as they are made aware of them, which technically speaking means they are not liable for the infringement that occurs before the video is taken down (well, depending on your interpretation of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, though that is the prevailing interpretation). However, EMI says that the video service only removes specific videos it is alerted to, not other videos featuring the same sound recording. They also make no effort, EMI say, to spot infringing content themselves (something YouTube is doing, increasingly through its automated content blocking system).
Vimeo, which is owned by IAC, which is run by Ticketmaster chairman Barry Diller (fact fans), are yet to respond. Perhaps they could get Barry to lip sync to the closing minute of ‘Killing In The Name’ and stick it up on Vimeo.
