VidAngel CEO outlines concerns over copyright injunction
The CEO of online streaming website VidAngel has outlined his company’s compliance problems with an injunction won by Hollywood studios.
Neil Harmon filed his declaration yesterday, December 21, at the US District Court for the Central District of California, Western Division, claiming that VidAngel faces a number of problems in its compliance with the injunction.
This week, WIPR reported that VidAngel, which offers $1 films with parental controls, had appealed against the injunction to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Earlier in December, Judge Andre Birotte Jr ordered a preliminary injunction against the website.
This stemmed from a lawsuit filed in June this year by Disney, Lucasfilm, 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros, claiming copyright infringement and violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Last week, VidAngel also filed an ex parte application to stay the enforcement of the preliminary injunction, pending VidAngel’s appeal against it.
The Hollywood studies filed their opposition to VidAngel’s application on December 15. Although the court has not yet ruled on the stay request, it has taken the motion under submission.
Now, Harmon has outlined the problems facing the website in complying.
According to Harmon, VidAngel makes 84.3% of its sales through app stores such as Roku, Apple, Google Play, and Amazon Fire TV.
However, to avoid risking disruptions to their users' experience during a critical time of the year, the Apple and Roku stores don’t permit modifications to the apps during the holiday season.
This means that VidAngel can’t modify its most popular apps until early January and so, even if it did remove existing titles from its library now, the system couldn’t be modified to show that the titles were no longer available for sale.
“The only alternative would be for VidAngel to completely turn off in-app purchasing across the board—which would prevent VidAngel from offering content that it is directly licensed to filter and stream, or as to which the rights holders have no objection to VidAngel's service,” he said.
Since the injunction was issued, VidAngel has contacted 125-plus studios and distributors to let them know that if the website is “unsuccessful in obtaining a stay of the preliminary injunction, it will cease filtering and streaming them”.
It will also stop buying new DVD and Blu-ray discs of their movies unless they are willing to enter into a covenant not to sue.
To date, MGM has rejected VidAngel’s request for a covenant not to sue and the site has yet to hear from many others, said Harmon.
He added that VidAngel would not be able to cope with the influx of customer service requests and that it will take time to develop updated apps to address the issues that result from the preliminary injunction order.
