DMCA safe harbor provision applies to copyright infringement claims brought under state common law — UMG Recordings, Inc. v. Escape Media Group, Inc., 2012 WL 2847859 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. July 10, 2012)

A New York court ruled that the “safe harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) apply to copyright infringement claims brought under state copyright law.  UMG Recordings (UMG), a division of Universal Music Group, sued the owners of the online music service Grooveshark for violation of copyrights in sound recordings created before February 15, 1972.  Why that specific date?  We’ll find out shortly.  According to UMG, Grooveshark allows its users to upload digital copies of songs through its website.  Grooveshark then copies the songs to its servers, from which users of the website can retrieve and access the songs by running a search by song title or artist.

Grooveshark argued that it qualified for the “safe harbor” provision of the DMCA that protects a service provider from copyright infringement claims based on its storage of the offending materials at the direction of a user.  UMG countered that the safe harbor applies only to copyrights created under and protected by the U.S. Copyright Act.  The claims at issue, however, were based on New York State common law, not the federal Copyright Act.  And while the Copyright Act preempts state law in certain instances, common law copyrights created before February 15, 1972 are not federally preempted until 2067.

The court doesn’t buy UMG’s argument.  The court found no indication in the text of the DMCA that Congress intended to limit the applicability of the safe harbors to just recordings made after February 15, 1972.  The terms “copyright owner” and “infringing” in the DMCA safe harbor provisions were no less applicable to common law copyright than to statutory copyright. Therefore, the court refused to dismiss the safe harbor defense.