Author: Kyle A. Slowey

Federal judge tosses suit over music video that was pulled down, then re-posted, and had its view count reset Performers who leap on to YouTube may be visually savvy, marketing smart, and outstanding early adopters of cutting-edge social media platforms. But besides promoting themselves zealously in cyber space with online services, they also need to step up and master an old legal fundamental: It pays to read the fine print before consenting to any agreement in ink and paper or electrons, as a federal judge in San Francisco has reminded an unhappy plaintiff. To be sure, the overwhelming majority of YouTube users likely would fail a quiz on the service provider’s terms of service (TOS) agreement before assenting to it. But if the too blithely check off a box on an online page and move ahead with understanding their legal situation, they then also can’t gripe to courts and seek relief when YouTube removes, relocates, and resets the view count of their posted music videos. That was the beef in Darnaa, LLC v. Google Inc. Plaintiff Darnaa was a limited liability company, an independent music label promoting and producing the works of artist Darnaa. The LLC in March, 2014, uploaded to YouTube the artist’s music video Cowgirl as part of an advertising campaign to promote sales of the song recordings in online digital music stores. But, yippee-ki-yay, YouTube made that ditty mosey where Darnaa didn’t expect...