Videographic Syndicator Sues to Stop YouTube Infringers From Stealing Its Content

Viral DRM, a syndicator of videographic content depicting tornadoes, hurricanes, flooding, blizzards, volcanoes and climate change impacts, brought suit Monday in U.S. District Court for Northern California in San Francisco to stop YouTube infringers from stealing its footage, reposting it to their own YouTube channels and illicitly collecting ad revenue from it. Viral DRM’s videos of extreme weather events “are frequently copied, downloaded, and reuploaded by infringers,” said its complaint (docket 3:23-cv-06261). Viral DRM “is a popular and frequent source of footage of weather events that cannot be obtained elsewhere,” it said. “This makes plaintiff a frequent target for infringers and pirates.” Once the pirated videos are downloaded, the defendants edits them to remove or crop out Viral DRM’s “proprietary watermarks and metadata,” it said. After editing the pirated videos, “the defendants combined the plaintiff’s videos with other video content that they either stole from others or created themselves,” it said. They then “reupload the resulting video to their YouTube channels and enabled advertising on them to earn monetization revenue,” it said. Viral DRM notified YouTube and the defendants of the infringement allegations via Digital Millennium Copyright Act notices, it said. Some of the defendants responded to the notices by removing the content they had uploaded to YouTube, it said. Others responded to the DMCA notices “with false and misleading counternotices,” it said.