Universal Music Sues Grouper and Bolt.com, YouTube Escapes (old news)
Digging the story about Bolt, I found this old related article.
Would Grouper be next?
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The story everyone expected to see this week was a major media company suing YouTube over copyright. Well, Universal Music has indeed sued some video-sharing companies today, but thanks to a deal struck with YouTube last week, the market leader escaped unharmed. Instead it’s two smaller players - Bolt.com and Grouper - that face the wrath of Universal’s lawyers and a possible $150,000 in damages for every infringement.
Universal says that thousands of videos are being shared without permission, which would put the total figure owed in the hundreds of millions. According to Reuters, the charge is “copying, reformatting, distributing and creating derivative works from Universal’s musicians”. As it happens, the $150,000 figure is pretty standard in these cases: it’s the amount that News Corp, NBC Universal and Viacom could sue YouTube for if the site doesn’t offer them a decent cut of the revenue. A Universal spokesperson is quoted as saying “Grouper and Bolt… cannot reasonably expect to build their business on the backs of our content and the hard work of our artists and songwriters without permission and without compensating the content creators”.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court, Central District of California, late today.
It’s very strange that Bolt.com and Grouper in particular were called out, while Metacafe, MySpace Video, Guba, vSocial, Veoh and big players like Google Video have so far avoided any issues - none of these sites encourage the sharing of copyrighted content and all of them take it down when alerted, but the uploading of infringing material is inevitable when you run a decently-sized video sharing service. Grouper operates a P2P network which might be somewhat shady, but Bolt works just like YouTube and the other video-sharing services. It’s not even a particularly high-profile site. Universal, however, are comparing the services to Kazaa and Napster, which will seriously worry the parties involved. We can only assume that Universal at least approached the sites about the issue, or that they’ve been considering their options for a long time. Perhaps they spoke to a number of companies and YouTube were more willing to co-operate - we simply don’t know right now.
This lawsuit is almost certainly going to set the precedent for future legal action involving video sharing sites - everybody will be following the story closely.
