Opinion ID: 4664443
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: DMCA Section 1202(b)(3)

Text: Plaintiffs argue that the district court erred in granting summary judgment to Getty as to their claim for altering their CMI without authority under Section 1202(b)(3) of the DMCA because there is a genuine dispute of material fact as to whether Getty: (1) knowingly altered their CMI without authority; and (2) knew or had reason to know that distributing their images would induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal an infringement. We disagree. 1 Notably, the 2012 agreement between NewSport and Corbis provided that any images submitted to Corbis under prior agreements were to be governed by the new terms and conditions. 5 We recently explained that to establish a violation of Section 1202(b)(3), a plaintiff must prove: (1) the existence of CMI in connection with a copyrighted work; and (2) that a defendant “distribute[d] . . . works [or] copies of works”; (3) while “knowing that [CMI] has been removed or altered without authority of the copyright owner or the law”; and (4) while “knowing or . . . having reasonable grounds to know” that such distribution “will induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal an infringement.” Mango v. BuzzFeed, Inc., 970 F.3d 167, 171 (2d Cir. 2020) (alterations in original) (quoting 17 U.S.C. § 1202(b)). The last two of these elements comprise a “so-called ‘double-scienter requirement.’” Id. “[T]he defendant who distributed improperly attributed copyright material must have actual knowledge that CMI ‘has been removed or altered without authority of the copyright owner or the law,’ as well as actual or constructive knowledge that such distribution ‘will induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal an infringement.’” Id. (quoting 17 U.S.C. § 1202(b)). The statutory definition of CMI encompasses, inter alia, “[t]he name of, and other identifying information about, the copyright owner of the work, including the information set forth in a notice of copyright.” 17 U.S.C. § 1202(c)(3). Here, no reasonable juror could conclude that Getty knowingly removed or altered Plaintiffs’ CMI without authority. As the district court concluded, there is no evidence in the record on which Plaintiffs can rely to establish that Getty had actual knowledge that the images at issue were comingled with the NewSport collection. On the contrary, a reasonable juror could conclude only that Getty did not know about Plaintiffs’ purported rights in the images until Zuma contacted Getty on May 4, 2016, to complain that Getty did not have authorization to use the images—i.e., until after Getty had completed the migration process and posted the images to its website. Getty promptly thereafter removed whatever images it could identify as associated with Zuma from its public-facing website and launched a full investigation into what had happened. 6 A reasonable juror could find only that the purported changes to Plaintiffs’ CMI resulted not from some intentional act of which Getty was aware but from aberrations and mistakes in the automatic migration process itself, during which Getty processed approximately 7,000,000 images. For example, the appearance of a double byline in the metadata of the images resulted from the original inclusion of Zuma’s attribution information in Corbis’s free-text caption field as opposed to Corbis’s photographer name or agency fields. The engineers who developed the migration process did not account for the possibility that CMI would appear in the free-text caption of any image. Contrary to Plaintiffs’ contentions, Getty’s post-migration communications fail to create a dispute of material fact as to whether Getty had actual knowledge that it altered Plaintiffs’ CMI when it undertook the migration process, let alone that it did so without authority. Although the June 27, 2016 email chain that Plaintiffs reference vaguely suggests that Les Walker may have had a “Zuma conversation” with Getty “at some point previously during the migration to Getty talks,” J. App’x at 784, Walker flatly testified at his deposition that he was unaware that the images were even in the NewSport collection prior to the migration and that he did not discuss the images with Getty until after the migration. Likewise, the May 5, 2016 conversation that Plaintiffs reference—in which employees investigating Zuma’s complaint suggested that Getty may have been aware of “the Zuma thing”—is insufficient, without more, to impute actual knowledge of Zuma’s supposed ownership of the CMI to Getty, particularly given that one of the Getty employees noted in the same conversation that “other than the caption, there is no indication in the Corbis data that [the images] belong to Zuma.” J. App’x at 780. We therefore conclude that the district court did not err in granting summary judgment to Getty as to Plaintiffs’ DMCA claim. 2 2 Because we conclude that Plaintiffs cannot establish that Getty knowingly removed or altered 7