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Last month, a New York district court refused to dismiss most of the copyright infringement claims asserted against a website operator based on an allegation that the website linked to an infringing copy of plaintiff’s software stored on a third-party’s servers. (Live Face on Web, LLC v. Biblio Holdings LLC, 2016 WL 4766344 (S.D.N.Y., September 13, 2016)).

The software at issue allows websites to display a video of a personal host to welcome online visitors, explaining the website’s products or services and, ideally, capturing the attention of the visitor and increasing the site’s “stickiness.”  A website operator/customer implements the software by embedding an HTML script tag to its website code to link the website to a copy of the software on the customer’s server or an outside server. When a user’s browser retrieves a webpage, a copy of the software is allegedly stored on the visitor’s computer in cache.

The plaintiff claimed that the defendant used an infringing version of its software to display the welcome video on its website.  The defendant countered that, in good faith, it hired a web developer to implement this functionality, that the developer represented that it had exclusive rights to its software, and that the software was not hosted by the defendant.

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The content in this post was found at http://newmedialaw.proskauer.com/2016/10/06/know-thy-software-vendor-website-operator-cannot-sidestep-copyright-infringement-claims-over-link-to-allegedly-infringing-software/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NewMediaAndTechnologyLaw+%28New+Media+and+Technology+Law%29 and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.