Online Product Management Beyond DMCA Safe Harbor

Richard Raysman is a Partner in our New York office

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was in large part designed to help content providers prevent copyright infringement on the Internet. Nonetheless, a countervailing concernt is firmly embedded into its text. In realizing the potential for copyright infringement claims against entities that merely provide the infrastructure and storage capability that others will utilize to commit actual copyright infringement, the statute contains a safe harbor provision, 17 U.S.C. § 512(c). This provision is designed to protect online service providers from copyright infringement liability arising from the storing infringing material on their networks when directed by users. As the number of websites proliferate that offer opportunities for users to upload and subsequently store files of significant size, the cases analyzing and deciding the purview of the safe harbor have increased.