VidAngel, Content Companies Fight Over Injunction

VidAngel's "buy-sellback" model it uses to justify the legality of its service "is a sham," since the company -- which streams filtered video ripped from discs -- doesn't buy a disc for every customer who streams a work, and most customers who supposedly buy a disc via VidAngel sell it back within hours of buying it, appellees Disney, 21st Century Fox and Time Warner said in an answering brief (in Pacer) Thursday in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. It responded to a VidAngel appeal of a December lower court preliminary injunction. In its opening brief (in Pacer) last month in the appeal, VidAngel said 2005's Family Movie Act (FMA) expressly granted households the right to watch filtered movies and filtering "is profoundly transformative." It said the FMA means the studios are unlikely to win their reproduction and public performance claims; thus the lower court's injunction was wrong. The lower court also erred in finding the studios are likely to succeed on their access control circumvention claim, VidAngel said, since the studios' arguments would give them unilateral authority to prevent even noninfringing uses of their content. The content companies said the preliminary injunction met all four factors of injunctive relief -- especially since the company didn't show its affirmative defenses of fair use and FMA would likely defeat liability -- and that VidAngel didn't show the court erred in its conclusions, or even abused its discretion.