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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

This should be a fairly open and shut piracy case for the video maker. Zoo is a British magazine with a real company behind it. Facebook is a US-based company and is redistributing the video (and likely making money from the adverts). The video maker is based in the US. He can start with filing a case against FB (seems he has a US lawyer lined up already), and once he collects from that, he pays a UK lawyer to follow up against Zoo's parent.

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And Zoo's actions are clearly willful infringement. I don't know if he can apply US law when going after the UK magazine, but in the US willful infringement can lead to $150,000 statutory damages per incident. They can't fall back on the "the user did it, we're not responsible" defense relied on by Facebook, Wikipedia, etc.

A friend of mine is going through this right now, a UK company ripped off his video and posted it on their site and on YouTube. They're playing hardball with some really strange reasoning. I'm sure they know they're in the wrong but if they admit it, they'll open the floodgates for more claims.

Wouldn't DMCA protect Facebook from legal action here?

Yes and no. Facebook can be forced to take down the content (this is the purpose of DMCA takedowns), so they are not protected from that. As for damages, no - you have to go after the person who posted it, in this case the scumbag assholes at Zoo.

It would if they promptly removed offending content.

I'm not sure what the exact timeline in the DMCA is (72 hours?), but the 17,000,000 views that went by before removal is something... (Not sure where the counter was when the removal request was received.)

Not sure what that status of money made on material you've been told was infringing and haven't taken down is..

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