3 Count: 1300 Blocks
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1: Zillow Ordered to Pay $1.9 Million in Copyright Case
First off today, Heidi Groover at The Seattle Times reports that the real estate listing site Zillow has been ordered to pay nearly $2 million to the photography company VHT.
VHT licenses real estate photos for marketing purposes and many of its photos appear on Zillow. However, the issue arose with a new section of the Zillow site named Zillow Digs that allows homeowners to price home renovations. According to the lawsuit, Zillow used images from ZHT in that section without permission.
This prompted ZHT to file the lawsuit and decided that Zillow’s infringement was innocent until July 10, 2014, when ZHT sent a cease and desist letter to the company. Between that date and 2016, when Zillow removed the images, the court ruled the infringement was not innocent and that amounted to 2,312 images. As such, the judge has ordered Zillow to pay a total of $1.93 million in damages and interest for the infringements.
2: Japanese Publishing Giants to Sue US Firm Over Manga Piracy
Next up today, the Agence France-Presse reports that a group of four Japanese manga publishers have announced their plans to sue the U.S. network company Cloudflare over what they say is the company’s aiding in piracy of their product.
According to the companies, Cloudflare provides key infrastructure that enables pirate websites to sustain large amounts of traffic. However, even when notified about significant copyright infringement taking place, Cloudflare has failed to act against those sites.
As a result of this, the publishers are planning to sue Cloudflare and will be seeking 400 million yen ($3.5 million) in damages.
3: Nintendo Hits YouTube Soundtrack Channel With Over 1300 Copyright Blocks
Finally today, Zack Zwiezen at Kotaku reports that YouTuber GilvaSunner has posted a tweet indicating that Nintendo has sent his channel over 1,300 “copyright blocks” on his channel.
GilvaSunner runs a YouTube channel focused on Nintendo Soundtracks and uploads soundtracks. Though he doesn’t monetize the videos, GilvaSunner has had repeated issues with Nintendo, having received hundreds of such notices in the past.
However, this is the largest at one time, and it impacts the soundtracks for some 16 different games, which are no longer accessible on the channel.
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