YouTube Copyright Lawsuit Over Anti-Piracy Tools Dropped On Eve Of Trial
Written by djfrosty on June 12, 2023
A Grammy Award-winning composer has dropped her closely-watched lawsuit against YouTube over access to its anti-piracy tools like Content ID, just a day before it had been set to go to trial — and weeks after a federal judge gutted the case by refusing to let it move forward as a class action.
Maria Schneider spent years litigating her lawsuit, which claimed that YouTube had become a “hotbed of piracy” because it provided effective content tools only to “powerful copyright owners” like record labels and not to “ordinary owners” like artists and songwriters.
But on Sunday (June 11), with a jury trial scheduled to kick off on Monday morning), lawyers for both sides told a federal judge that they had agreed to end the case without a decision: “In light of the stipulation of dismissal of all claims with prejudice, the jury trial set for June 12, 2023, is vacated,” Judge James Donato wrote. “The case is closed.”
The sudden end to the case came just weeks after Judge Donato issued a crucial ruling that dramatically reduced the scope of the lawsuit: That Schneider could not team up with tens of thousands of other rightsholders who she claims suffered similar harm from YouTube’s policies.
Schneider quickly moved to appeal that ruling and postpone the trial, arguing that it would “gravely undermine” the goals of her lawsuit. But a federal appeals court denied that motion on Friday.
Faced with a jury trial they had warned would be “enormously wasteful,” Schneider’s lawyers dropped their case. Neither side immediately returned requests for more information about how the resolution of the litigation was reached, including specific details about any kind of settlement agreement.
Filed in 2020, Schneider’s lawsuit claims that YouTube (owned by Google parent Alphabet) forces songwriters and other smaller rights holders to use “vastly inferior and time-consuming manual means” of policing infringement, allowing piracy of their material to flourish on the platform.
For its part, YouTube says it’s done nothing wrong. In court documents, the company has argued that it’s spent “spent over $100 million developing industry-leading tools” to prevent piracy, but that it limits access because “in the hands of the wrong party, these tools can cause serious harm.”
The case was filed as a class action, aiming to let potentially tens of thousands of aggrieved copyright owners team up to fight what Schneider’s lawsuit called “institutionalized misbehavior.” An expert retained by her legal team said the class could include between 10,000 and 20,000 rights holders.
But in a May 22 ruling, Judge Donato refused to “certify” the case as a class action. Under federal law, class-action accusers must share very similar legal concerns — and the judge said Schneider’s fellow rights holders would have widely different cases against YouTube.
Following that ruling, Schneider quickly moved to postpone the trial. But at a hearing days after the decision, Donato said he would stick to the schedule: “I’m not going to do that. You got a trial set on June 12th. This is a 2020 case; OK. It’s showtime.”
In a June 5 emergency petition to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Schneider’s lawyers demanded the appeals court put the case on ice while she filed an appeal on the class certification issue. They argued that a “brief” pause would prevent the judge’s “last-minute, haphazard and erroneous” ruling from derailing a case with important implications.
“The named plaintiffs here joined the case to litigate class claims, and to vindicate their view that YouTube tramples on the rights of independent artists and smaller copyright holders overall, not just those of the individual plaintiffs,” her lawyers told the appeals court.
But in a ruling published on Friday evening, the Ninth Circuit rejected those arguments: “The court, in its discretion, denies the petition for permission to appeal,” the court wrote. “Petitioners’ emergency motion for a stay is denied as moot.”
Schneider and her lawyers still could have proceeded to trial against YouTube, litigating the case simply on behalf of her and another plaintiff. But they had strongly indicated in court filings that they did not want to proceed to the trial without class-action status.