RIAA record labels in landmark win over Spinrilla
Record companies backed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have secured a legal victory against the hip hop mixtape service Spinrilla, which they had accused of copyright infringement on a massive scale.
On Monday 30 November, the District Court for the Northern District of Georgia in Atlanta held that Spinrilla had directly infringed copyrighted works by streaming them without the proper authorisation.
In 2013, Jeffery Dylan Copeland launched the Spinrilla website as a streaming and downloading service for hip-hop music. According to the court filing, Spinrilla has approximately 19 million registered users and 1.5 million daily active users, 14,000 of whom have the ability to upload audio files.
In March 2015, a collection of RIAA record labels, including Atlantic Records and UMG Recordings, began sending notices of copyright infringement to Spinrilla.
Between March 4, 2015 and February 6, 2017, a team of investigators under the direction of Carlos Linares, vice president of anti-piracy legal affairs at RIAA, sent 59 “takedown notices” requesting that Spinrilla remove 407 identified sound recordings from its website and apps.
In 2017, the companies sued Spinrilla for copyright infringement, and a year later, they accused the streaming provider of infringing a total of 4,082 total works in an amended complaint.
“Spinrilla specialises in ripping off music creators by offering thousands of unlicensed sound recordings for free,” the RIAA said at the time.
The hip hop site responded by holding that Spinrilla had implemented an anti-piracy filter, Audible Magic, which had been approved by RIAA, to scan every audio file uploaded since December 2015. Consequently, it stated that it had succeeded in blocking more than 100,000 potentially infringing files that had been uploaded to Spinrilla.
Spinrilla also argued that the companies had failed to point to any actual infringing conduct that the streaming company itself had committed, holding that an internet service provider is not liable for the uploading of copyrighted material by its users.
In the lawsuit, the record companies also claimed that the streaming of sound recordings over the internet constitutes a public performance; and that in making the recordings available for streaming without a licence, Spinrilla had infringed their “exclusive right of performance”.
But Spinrilla countered by pointing to the 1995 Digital Millennium Copyright Act or “DMCA”, which it said granted companies the right to perform copyrighted sound recordings publicly by means of digital audio transmissions. The DMCA provides a limitation on liability for online service providers against claims of copyright infringement.
This week, however, the court held that the DMCA “safe harbour” did not apply to Spinrilla’s actions. To qualify for the defence under the DMCA, the service provider must satisfy certain criteria regarding the storage and transfer of copyright infringing material, said the court. But it added that Spinrilla had failed to meet these requirements until 2017, five months after the lawsuit was filed.
The court stated that the undisputed facts “demonstrate that defendants did not satisfy all of the required elements to be eligible for the defence” until July 29, 2017, which is when it first met the necessary requirements by designating an agent with the US Copyright Office and adopting “a repeat infringer policy”.
In her ruling, Judge Amy Totenberg concluded that Spinrilla admitted that 4,082 copyrighted sound recordings that were the subject of the suit had been streamed at least once through its website or app.
She also added that there was no dispute that Spinrilla and its founder were aware that nine DJs had repeatedly infringed copyrights before July 2017, and had failed to terminate the user accounts of all but one of these DJs.
As a result, Spinrilla was held liable for directly infringing the copyrights of the 4,082 sound recordings that were listed in the complaint.
With the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per work, this ruling opens the door to an award of more than $600 million dollars.
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