Techdirt: We've been covering the major labels' legal efforts against Vimeo for its encouragement of lipdub videos before (that these videos frequently help to promote songs and make them more popular isn't even something that the major labels seem willing to recognize). In a new ruling, a judge has allowed the case to move forward with an upcoming trial, thus rejecting a full summary judgment. The ruling contains a mix of good things and bad things. Let's explore a few of them
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I never cease to be amazed by the complexity of copyright laws. Author Mike Masnick spent a lot of time in this article discussing whether or not the actions of Vimeo employees should be held against the company or not. It seems that these employees were, outside of work, enjoying the online service provided by their employer. It's unfortunate that there isn't a clear-cut way to prove this. I can imagine that there is the potential for employees to be fired in this situation, especially if their actions end up being held against the company. It seems that Vimeo, for the most part, has handled this situation gracefully. Their policies have continued to be appropriate as their company has grown. As far as I can tell from this article, there is no law stating that a policy has to be enforced in a certain way, so it's not enough for the plaintiff to say that Vimeo hasn't done enough to police violations of copyright laws via videos uploaded to/downloaded from their site. I'm interested to see how the 1972 thing shakes out...does this mean that Vimeo might have to pay damages for any of the copyrighted songs used in videos posted to their sites that were written/published before 1972? I doubt that this pool of videos would be a majority of the videos supposedly in violation of the law, but it could be a significant amount of them- enough to cause quite a bit of financial damage for Vimeo.
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