Pinterest shakes photographer’s copyright claims
Pinterest has convinced a California judge to drop charges from a photographer claiming the website aids in the mass copyright infringement of its users.
Photographer Blaine Harrington III filed a class action complaint against the social media website last year calling it the “bane of copyright owners” for allowing its users to share virtual image boards of copyrighted material.
The US District Court for the Northern District of California granted Pinterest’s order to dismiss two of the three claims of Harrington’s complaint on Friday, 3 September, claiming that the photographer had not sufficiently proved that Pinterest had contributed to the infringement on its website.
The court said: “The plaintiffs did not have evidence that the defendant’s distribution of photographs ever induced, enabled, facilitated or concealed ‘any particular act of infringement by anyone, let alone a pattern of such infringement likely to recur in the future’.”
Harrington filed the putative class action lawsuit asserting claims for direct copyright infringement, contributory infringement and violation of the DMCA.
His counts of contributory infringement and violation of the Digitial Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) were dismissed, the court did not rule on Harrington’s first count of direct copyright infringement.
The court also gave Harrington one last opportunity to amend his complaint, with an undetermined deadline set for this month.
CMI data
Harrington alleged that Pinterest does not a system in place to screen pinned images for copyright notices, instead actively removing indicia of copyright ownership from pinned images known as copyright management information (CMI).
When a user uploads images, Pinterest renames the image with a new JPEG name and strips identifying data. This according to the complaint, makes it a source of “rampant infringement by third parties”.
Pinterest contended that the DMCA claims should be dismissed as the removal of this information is not actionable.
The court sided with Pinterest, claiming that Harrington failed to identify a single instance in which removal of CMI metadata from any photographs “ induced, enabled, facilitated or concealed infringement.”
The court also claimed that Harrington failed to allege sufficient facts to satisfy the contributory infringement claim, dismissing it with leave to amend.
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