Porn distribution company loses piracy suit appeal against Web host

Enlarge / Who needs the letter "B" when you can have a jolly roger? (credit: Brasil2 | Getty Images)

A federal appeals court has upheld a ruling that site hosts are not liable for copyright infringement committed by the sites they host, so long as they take the "simple measures" of forwarding claims to the site owner.

The ruling follows a legal battle between adult content company ALS Scan and site hosting service Steadfast. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2 to 1 on Friday (PDF) that even though ALS has a "whack-a-mole problem" with pirated content popping up on Imagebam, a site Steadfast hosts, the host did its part to prevent the piracy.

Working as intended

A copyright owner, such as ALS, can file a claim against a site, such as Imagebam, that is unlawfully sharing its copyrighted content. That often means sending notice to the site host-the entity you'd find listed in a whois search-about it. The host, in this case Steadfast, is then required to forward the notice along to the site owner and check that the site owner does in fact take the content down.

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