14 DAY TRIAL // One court in California decided that site hosting services aren't liable for copyright infringement just for hosting pirate sites.
Judge Wu of the Federal Court in California has ruled that Steadfast cannot be held liable as there isn't sufficient evidence to support the claims, TorrentFreak reports.
It all started last year, when adult entertainment publisher ALS Scan decided to sue several third-party services, namely content delivery network CloudFlare, JuicyAds ad network, and several hosting providers, including Steadfast.
"Steadfast does not operate or manage the Imagebam website. Steadfast does not in any way communicate with or interact with Imagebam's individual users. Steadfast only provides computer storage," the company wrote in a plea for the motion to be dismissed.
Insufficient proof
The California District Court agreed that the allegations weren't sufficient to hold the hosting company liable for the actions of one of its client. This has been an issue in multiple court cases thus far, and it seems that there's no end to how many times this issue will be brought in front of a judge.
Judge George Wu argued that merely hosting a pirate site does not make the hosting service liable for any copyright infringement actions the site may be guilty of. "The court is unaware of any authority holding that merely alleging that a defendant provides some form of 'hosting' service to an infringing website is sufficient to establish contributory copyright infringement," reads the judge's decision.
Furthermore, there are also notes indicating that it cannot be proven that Steadfast provides its hosting services with the purpose of promoting copyright infringement or that it encourages the image sharing site to display pirated content. For the copyright holder to prove this, they'd have to show that the host has control over what the site does and how its infringing actions benefit them financially, which isn't the case here, or in pretty much any other case involving a hosting service.