14 DAY TRIAL // Cyberlockers don't exactly have many friends and in the wake of the MegaUpload attack, many such sites have decided to call it quits. What's more, spurred by the "effectiveness" of the MegaUpload attack, which shut down the site without having to prove any wrong doing, the copyright-dependent industries are becoming more aggressive.
Hotfile is one of the companies targeted in several lawsuits, but it now has found a friend, albeit a reluctant one, in Google which has filed an amicus brief in one of the lawsuits arguing that the DMCA safe harbour protection should not be ignored by the court.
The lawsuit was filed about a year ago but the MPAA, the US movie industry lobbying group, has asked for a summary judgment, which would have the court shut down the site immediately, arguing that the site is dedicated almost exclusively to copyright infringement.
This, the MPAA said, would not make it eligible for DMCA safe harbor protection. This is where Google intervened saying that the "amount" of infringement and even awareness of the infringement, even on a large scale, does not warrant the waiver of DMCA protection.
"The case-law uniformly rejects efforts to deprive service providers of the safe harbor based on generalized awareness that unspecified (or even 'rampant') infringement is occurring on their services," Google explained.
Google goes into detail and refutes most of the claims that copyright companies have been making recent years. For example, no company can be forced to implement filters to pro-actively look for infringing files, it is covered by safe harbor even if it refuses to do so.
Google also defended the practice of only removing links and not the actual files when receiving a DMCA take down notice. While it may not seem so, there is a difference between the two. By removing the file, a site would kill all links pointing to it affecting all users that uploaded the file, even those that had authorization to do so.
The company has intervened in cases like this before and has every incentive to do so as any judgment that takes away from the DMCA safe harbors will affect Google as well as most other company online.
Understandably, the MPAA asked the court to reject the amicus brief since the arguments have been made or should have been made by Hotfile and because Google is a partisan party presenting a "one-sided" view of the argument.