Delhi High Court Issues Notice On YouTuber's Plea Challenging Meta's Copyright Strike Mechanism

The Delhi High Court on Tuesday issued notice on an application by stock market trading content creator Saurabh Maurya challenging the manner in which his account was suspended following copyright strikes.

Even as Meta informed the court that Maurya's account had been restored and the strikes against it reversed, Justice Anup Jairam Bhambhani issued notice on his broader challenge to the manner in which intermediaries act on copyright strikes.

Maurya approached the court after his account was taken offline for a second time. His counsel told the court that the account had remained suspended since July 27.

Counsel alleged that a person had backdated a post on Blogspot and used it as the basis for claiming prior ownership of the content. He said this had resulted in copyright strikes against Maurya's account.

“Because I am the owner of the copyright. This is my video with my face. I have made it,” Maurya's counsel told the court. “Somebody purports to say, actually, I posted this earlier. And therefore, you remove it.”

Maurya argued that Meta's copyright-strike system was contrary to the Supreme Court's ruling in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India and required clarification in light of the Delhi High Court's ruling in MySpace Inc. v. Super Cassettes Industries.

Counsel took the court through paragraph 122 of Shreya Singhal. He argued that Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act requires an intermediary to act on actual knowledge arising from a court order directing removal of content.

He then argued that MySpace should be clarified to mean that a copyright notice can trigger action where the complainant is a registered copyright owner or has been declared the copyright owner by a court. He said the same should not apply to a person merely claiming ownership.

“This entire mechanism is being abused,” counsel argued. He said intermediaries were effectively “actually making a determination” on whether copyright infringement had occurred when they acted on such claims.

Counsel also argued that an intermediary could not decide whether copyright infringement had occurred and then suspend an account on that basis. He said such a decision amounted to an exercise of discretion that was contrary to Shreya Singhal.

Appearing for Meta, Varun Patak submitted that Maurya's account had already been restored and the copyright strikes had been reversed.

The court then referred to its recent order in a matter involving Home Box Office concerning mirror websites carrying copyright-infringing content.

Justice Bhambhani said the court had distinguished between an intermediary exercising discretion over what content should be taken down and carrying out limited technical verification.

The judge gave the example of a website that had been injuncted by the court but later appeared through a mirror or redirected URL. He said an intermediary could technically verify whether the new URL was indeed a mirror of the injuncted website.

“A judge can't do, a court can't do,” he observed. “So therefore, subject to that limited verification, technical verification, there is no discretion as far as then deciding what to block, what not to block. That is not their domain.”