In Superama Corp., Inc vs. Tokyo Broadcasting System TV, No. 19-55981 (9th Cir. 2020), the Ninth Circuit reaffirmed the district court decision to dismiss Superama’s copyright infringement claim against Tokyo Broadcasting as the court lacked subject matter jurisdiction to determine a copyright infringement suite.
Superama, which organizes the U.S. Sumo Open and makes videos and photographs from the event available on YouTube, had sued Tokyo Broadcasting System TV (TBS) as it discovered that TBS downloaded its copyrighted material off of YouTube, altered it, and rebroadcasted it throughout Japan without obtaining a license. Superama subsequently sued TBS for copyright infringement in the US Federal Court. The district court, however, dismissed the suite due to lack of subject matter jurisdiction under the longstanding rule that “[i]n general, United States copyrights laws do not have extraterritorial effect, and therefore, infringing actions that take place entirely outside the United States are not actionable.” Subafilms, Ltd. v. MGM-Pathe Commc’ns Co., 24 F.3d 1088, 1098 (9th Cir. 1994) (en banc)
On appeal, however, Superama claimed that given that although the infringing material was not distributed in the US, the court still had jurisdiction as YouTube’s US servers automatically creates a copy of a file on its servers when a user downloads it. Therefore, given that a copy of the unlicensed footage was made in the US as part of TBS's process of downloading it in Japan, the US had subject matter jurisdiction.
The Ninth Circuit, however, found no relevant precedent to support Superama claim that
"infringement occurs when a download abroad automatically creates a copy of the material on a United States server. There is thus no basis for finding jurisdiction where downloaded material is stored in the United States, but all infringing activity takes place in another country.”
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