Appeals Court Limits Vimeo's Liability for Copyright-Infringing Content

From Variety:

A federal appellate court has ruled that Vimeo has limited liability over users’ uploading of almost 200 videos with infringing music recordings, rejecting claims from record companies and publishers thatthey had shown that the site had "red flag” knowledge of piracy and even "willful blindness” to copyright violations.

The ruling from the three-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals is a victory not just for Vimeo but other user-generated content sites and Internet providers, who have for years been battling the content industry over the threshold at which they can be held legally liable for infringing content…

"A copyright owner’s mere showing that a video posted by a user on the service provider’s site includes substantially all of a recording recognizable copyrighted music, and that an employee of the service provider saw at least some part of the user’s material, is insufficient to sustain the copyright owner’s burden of proving that the service provider had either actual or red flag knowledge of the infringement,” the judges wrote.

They noted that "employees of service providers cannot be assumed to have expertise in the laws of copyright.”