Yeah, I’m still here, enjoying the Summer doldrums and the lack of anything remotely interesting on the China beat. But life goes on, and the longstanding fight over video sharing sites and enterprise liability continues to heat up.

Remember what’s at issue here. Millions of users upload video files to YouTube-ish sites, many of which files are copyrighted. Other users download these copyrighted files. Certainly there’s copyright infringement going on here, but who do we go after?

Several choices: the users who upload the files, the users who download the files, the video file sharing site, or the ISP.

Not very practical to go after users. Too many of them, so prosecution is not likely to act as much of a deterrent. Moreover, the sort of punishment likely in that sort of case is laughable. Not too scary.

ISP liability is one way to go, but there are some technical issues. ISPs are not omniscient, and we can’t really expect them to know what all their customers are doing all the time.

That leaves us with the file sharing site. Makes sense – that’s where the files are uploaded and indexed. And that’s where the fight is these days, between copyright owners and the site operators. Here’s the latest from China Tech News:

China International Television Corporation, an affiliate of CCTV, is using the Chinese courts to fight six online video service providers, including ku6.com, 6.cn and aeeboo.com.

Beijing’s Haidian District Court has already issued a preliminary order and judgment that the online video service providers had violated the rights of CCTV and has asked them to stop the infringement and compensate CCTV. CCTV is asking for CNY16.2 million in compensation.

CCTV says its distribution of TV soap operas has declined since last year due to the illegal broadcasting of these TV shows by these online video service providers.

However, a representative from ku6.com was cited by local media as saying that most of the online video programs on their website were uploaded by the Internet users instead of the website itself.

Note in particular that last sentence. Hey, don’t look at us, it’s those pesky users uploading copyrighted materials.

Right. As I’ve written before, this argument doesn’t really work anymore, and it won’t protect them this time.

All of these cases are moving in the same direction as foreign cases. Site operators will be held liable for infringement if they allow copyright infringement to occur without instituting reasonable safeguards.

The term to look out for in these discussions is “Takedown Policy,” referring to the internal systems put into place by these site operators that allow copyright owners to complain about infringing uploads, after which the claims are vetted and, if found to have merit, the files are then expunged from the database.

Takedown policy is OK? No liability. Policy found to be inadequate? You’re in trouble.

Some of my old blather on this subject can be found here and here.