VICTOR ELIAS PHOTOGRAPHY, LLC, Plaintiff-Appellant, versus ICE PORTAL, INC., Defendant-Appellee.
No. 21-11892
United States Court of Appeals For the Eleventh Circuit
August 12, 2022
[PUBLISH] Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida D.C. Docket No. 0:19-cv-62173-RS
Before NEWSOM and MARCUS, Circuit Judges, and COVINGTON,* District Judge.
COVINGTON, District Judge:
In 2016, commercial photographer Victor Elias discovered infringing uses of his copyrighted images on the internet. Instead of pursuing the infringing parties, Mr. Elias brought a lawsuit against Ice Portal, Inc. – now a division of Shiji (US), Inc. (“Shiji”) – which acts as an intermediary between the hotels that licensed Mr. Elias’s photographs and online travel agents (“OTAs”) like Expedia and Travelocity.1 In optimizing the photographs for use by the OTAs, Shiji’s software allegedly removed certain copyright-related information that Mr. Elias had embedded within the metadata of the photographs. Mr. Elias, through his company Victor Elias Photography, LLC (“Elias LLC”), claimed that Shiji therefore violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”).
The district court correctly granted summary judgment to Shiji because Elias LLC did not show an essential element of its claim – namely, that Shiji knew, or had reasonable grounds to
I
A. Mr. Elias’s photographs and their CMI
Mr. Elias is a professional photographer who specializes in taking photographs of hotels and resorts throughout the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean. He is the sole owner and operator of Elias LLC. Mr. Elias registers his photographs with the Copyright Office, and Elias LLC holds those copyrights by written assignment.
Between 2013 and 2017, Mr. Elias took photographs for hotels owned by Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. (“Starwood”)2 and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts (“Wyndham”) (collectively, the “Hotels”). Mr. Elias claims that the following information was inserted into the metadata within the image files that he sent to the Hotel properties:
| Creator | Victor Elias |
| Creator’s Job Title | Owner/Photographer |
| Copyright Notice | @Victor Elias |
| Creator’s Contact Info | USA, 5301 N. Commerce Ave. Suite 4, 805-265-5421 |
| Rights Usage Terms | Rights Managed |
This information is commonly referred to as copyright management information (“CMI”).4 Because CMI is embedded within the image file, an individual must make several “clicks” on the file to access this information. Specifically, the person viewing the file would have to right-click on the image file and then open the “properties” or “more info” field to access the information.
After Mr. Elias took the photographs at issue, Elias LLC would extend broad licenses to the Hotels, allowing them to use the photographs to promote their properties in unlimited quantities, for an unlimited time, and in any format – without a restriction on how the photographs’ CMI could be manipulated or removed.5 The Hotels were licensed to use the photographs at
B. Shiji’s role
Shiji acts as an intermediary between hotel chains, like Starwood and Wyndham, and OTAs by receiving copies of photographs from the hotels and making them available to OTAs. From 2013 to 2018, Shiji housed approximately 1.5 million different hotel images in its system. During the relevant time periods, Starwood and Wyndham contracted with Shiji to make images for thousands of their properties available to OTAs. Of the more than 9,400 images that Shiji processed for the Hotels, 220 were taken by Elias.
Between 2013 and 2018, Shiji processed photos collected from the Hotels in the following manner. First, Shiji’s software
C. Mr. Elias discovers photographs missing his CMI
Protecting his copyrights is important to Mr. Elias. He claims that he embedded the CMI within his photographs because the CMI’s text is fully searchable, allowing him to patrol the internet and find instances of copyright violations. As the district court succinctly summarized, Elias employs six methods by which he searches for his images and ensures that his copyright is not being violated:
(1) Elias visits OTA websites, types in the names of locations where he has shot photos of a hotel, then looks for the hotels he shot, and then looks for the images; (2) Elias Googles the hotel name plus “Victor Elias”; (3) Elias uses ImageRights software, which
searches for visual image matches on the internet; (4) Elias uses TinEye which searches for copies of images he uploads; and (5) Elias uses Google images to search for copies of the photos. According to Elias, he also uses Google to search using keywords such as “Victor Elias” and “Victor Elias Photography,” which can result in the return of pages containing keywords in the embedded metadata.
In September 2016, using the methods described above, Mr. Elias discovered unauthorized copies of his photographs posted on non-party, non-OTA websites without his CMI. Although some of these photographs included visible credits, the photographs credited someone other than Mr. Elias. He admits that he has no actual knowledge of where these non-party websites obtained the images. Mr. Elias then discovered that on OTA websites, his CMI was stripped out of the images at issue.
D. Procedural History
Based on the foregoing facts, Elias LLC filed suit against Shiji in August 2019. In its amended complaint, it alleged in a single count that Shiji violated two sections of the DMCA –
Following discovery, Shiji moved for summary judgment, and Elias LLC sought partial summary judgment. The district court ruled in favor of Shiji, finding that Elias LLC could not satisfy the “second scienter requirement” of the statute, a concept we will explain further below. Relying on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision in Stevens v. Corelogic, Inc., 899 F.3d 666 (9th Cir. 2018), the district court held that Elias LLC could not satisfy the second scienter requirement because it had not established that Shiji “knew or had reason to know that its actions would induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal infringement” and had failed to present any evidence “demonstrating that [Shiji] was aware or had reasonable grounds to be aware of the probable future impact of its actions.”
The district court reasoned that Elias LLC had failed to make its showing for two reasons. First, it had not shown that Shiji’s removal of CMI “is the reason, or even the likely reason, for the infringing use of the images [Mr. Elias] has found on the internet.” Second, Elias LLC had not shown that Shiji was even aware that searching for terms embedded in the extended attributes was a method used by copyright holders to find infringement on the internet. The district court also dismissed Elias LLC’s argument that a prior arbitration gave Shiji the requisite awareness because (1) it had failed to show that “mere familiarity” with the DMCA
Because the district court concluded that Elias LLC could not, as a matter of law, show that Shiji knew, or had reasonable grounds to know, that its actions would “induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal infringement,” the court entered summary judgment in favor of Shiji. This appeal followed.
II
We review a district court’s grant of summary judgment de novo, employing the “same legal standards that bound the district court.” Bonanni Ship Supply, Inc. v. United States, 959 F.2d 1558, 1561 (11th Cir. 1992).
Summary judgment is proper where “there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact and the movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law.”
III
A. The DMCA and Section 1202(b)’s second scienter requirement
Congress enacted the DMCA in 1998 “to strengthen copyright protection in the digital age.” Mango v. BuzzFeed, Inc., 970 F.3d 167, 170–71 (2d Cir. 2020). The DMCA provision pertinent to this case provides as follows:
(b) Removal or alteration of copyright management information. – No person shall, without the authority of the copyright owner or the law –
(1) intentionally remove or alter any copyright management information, [or]
. . .
(3) distribute, import for distribution, or publicly perform works, copies of works, or phonorecords, knowing that copyright management information has been removed or altered without authority of the copyright owner or the law,
knowing, or . . . having reasonable grounds to know, that it will induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal an infringement of any right under this title.
Interpretation of Section 1202(b) is an issue of first impression in this Circuit. We start, as always, with the language of the statute. Harris v. Garner, 216 F.3d 970, 972 (11th Cir. 2000) (en banc) (“We begin our construction of [a statutory provision] where courts should always begin the process of legislative interpretation, and where they should often end it as well, which is with the words of the statutory provision.”). If the statute’s language is plain, then the sole function of the court is to enforce the statute according to its terms. Gonzalez v. McNary, 980 F.2d 1418, 1420 (11th Cir. 1993). A statute should be construed to give effect to all its provisions, “so that no part of it will be inoperative or superfluous, void or insignificant.” Calzadilla v. Banco Latino Internacional, 413 F.3d 1285, 1287 (11th Cir. 2005).
By its plain terms, the statute requires proof that the defendant knew, or had reasonable grounds to know, that its conduct “will” induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal an infringement. Use of the word “will” indicates a degree of likelihood or certainty. See Spokane Cnty. v. Dep’t of Fish & Wildlife, 430 P.3d 655, 662 (Wash. 2018) (canvassing multiple dictionaries for definitions of the term “will,” and explaining that it “can be a statement of future tense, of strong intention or assertion about the future, or a probability or expectation about something,”
To assist in interpreting the statute, we may also look to the opinions of our sister Circuits. The Second Circuit has held that, to establish a violation of
We agree with our sister Circuits’ interpretation of the plain language9 of
To avoid superfluity, the mental state requirement in Section 1202(b) must have a more specific application than the universal possibility of encouraging infringement; specific allegations as to how identifiable infringements “will” be affected are necessary.
. . .
[W]e hold that a plaintiff bringing a Section 1202(b) claim must make an affirmative showing, such as by demonstrating a past “pattern of conduct” or “modus operandi,” that the defendant was aware [of] or had reasonable grounds to be aware of the probable future impact of its actions.
Stevens, 899 F.3d at 674.
The Ninth Circuit in Stevens, facing a similar fact pattern to the one now before us, rejected the statutory interpretation favored by Elias LLC. The plaintiffs there, also photographers whose CMI had allegedly been removed by an intermediary software provider, argued that “because one method of identifying an infringing photograph has been impaired, someone might be able to use their photographs undetected.” 899 F.3d at 673 (emphasis in original). The court explained that such a general approach to statutory interpretation “won’t wash.” Id. Citing the text of the statute and the legislative history of Section 1202, the Ninth Circuit concluded that plaintiffs must “provide evidence from which one can infer that future infringement is likely, albeit not certain, to occur as a result of the removal or alteration of CMI.” Id. at 675.
Before the district court and on appeal, Elias LLC points to three pieces of evidence that, it claims, create a genuine dispute of material fact as to whether Shiji knew or had reason to know that its actions “will induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal infringement” of copyrighted works. We examine each in turn.
1. The Leonardo arbitration
In urging us to reverse the district court’s grant of summary judgment, Elias LLC’s principal piece of evidence is a 2016 arbitration proceeding between Shiji and a competitor in the OTA photo distribution business, Leonardo Worldwide Corporation.10 The dispute began when two of Leonardo’s clients were looking to switch photo management services to Shiji (at the time, ICE Portal). In the arbitration, Leonardo accused Shiji of corporate infiltration and theft. It claimed that Shiji improperly accessed Leonardo’s image database, downloaded multiple images from the database without Leonardo’s consent, processed those images through Shiji’s own software (thereby scrubbing the images of CMI inserted by Leonardo), and then re-published the images on Shiji’s
The arbitration panel dismissed the DMCA claim on multiple grounds: (1) “Leonardo has not shown the essential ingredient of a DMCA claim that any allegedly improper actions regarding CMI would result in an infringement of a copyright”; (2) the panel construed Section 1202(b) as requiring that a DMCA claimant be both the owner of the copyright and the party who inserted the wrongly removed CMI, and Leonardo was not both because it was not the copyright owner; (3) Shiji’s removal of Leonardo’s CMI did not result in an infringement of any hotel copyrights; and (4) Leonardo lacked standing because the DMCA is intended to protect copyright holders that have employed CMI, and Leonardo had no copyright in the stolen images.
According to Elias LLC, Leonardo’s claims in the arbitration “put [Shiji] on notice and imbued [Shiji] with the necessary mental state to violate § 1202 in the future where, as here, [Shiji’s] metadata stripping system was challenged by [a] copyright owner.” In other words, while Leonardo’s lack of copyright ownership may have left its DMCA claim dead in the water, it was reasonably
First, the facts of the Leonardo arbitration are distinguishable. There, Shiji went farther than simply running images through its automated software and making those optimized images available on its server. Rather, it allegedly accessed, knowingly and without permission, a competitor’s database of copyrighted images, put those images through the scrubber, and then re-published them for direct financial gain. Therefore, “Leonardo allege[d] that [Shiji’s] actions induced, enabled, facilitated, or concealed [Shiji’s own] infringement of the copyrighted images.” (emphasis added). The Leonardo arbitration had nothing to do with whether Shiji’s role as an intermediary image optimizer might induce or enable infringement by a third party.
Second, and more importantly, the record before us does not indicate that the Leonardo arbitration adduced any facts that would give Shiji reason to know that its software’s effects on CMI would make copyright infringement “likely, albeit not certain” to occur. At most, the 2016 Leonardo arbitration gave Shiji knowledge that its software was scrubbing CMI from some of the extended attributes of the images – and, in fact, different extended attributes than the ones at issue here. But there is no evidence that
Third, it may have been reasonable for Shiji to presume, in the wake of the Leonardo arbitration, that the next DMCA lawsuit it faced would come from a copyright owner. But it does not follow that Shiji must have also known that it was engaging in conduct that violated the law. We do not hold here that prior litigation or arbitration of a DMCA claim can never give a defendant the requisite knowledge under Section 1202(b). We limit our holding to an affirmation of the district court’s conclusion that Leonardo’s particular accusations in this case did not give Shiji reasonable grounds to know that its software’s removal of CMI, and the subsequent distribution of photographs stripped of CMI, would induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal the infringement of Elias LLC’s copyrighted works.
For these reasons, the Leonardo arbitration fails to create a genuine issue of material fact as to whether Shiji knew, or had reasonable grounds to know, that its actions of stripping CMI and distributing those stripped images would “induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal an infringement.” See Stevens, 899 F.3d at 676 (“Because the [plaintiffs] have not put forward any evidence that [the defendant] knew its software carried even a substantial risk of inducing, enabling, facilitating, or concealing infringement, let
2. Mr. Elias’s purposeful insertion of CMI into images
Elias LLC claims that, unlike the photographer-plaintiffs in Stevens, Mr. Elias did use the CMI contained within the images’ extended attributes to police copyright infringement on the internet. This also fails to clear the summary judgment bar.
There is no indication in the record that Shiji knew at the relevant time that copyright owners use CMI in this manner. Elias LLC therefore cannot show that Shiji knew or had reason to know that removal of CMI could conceal an infringement. And Elias LLC cannot explain how it could police copyright infringement if an infringer can just as easily remove CMI metadata from an image as it could download an image from an OTA website. See Stevens, 899 F.3d at 676 (explaining that “a party intent on using a copyrighted photograph undetected can itself remove any CMI metadata, precluding detection through a search for the metadata. . . . [Thus,] one cannot plausibly say that removal by a third party ‘will’ make it easier to use a copyrighted photograph undetected”).
Elias LLC argues that the district court read requirements into Section 1202(b) that do not exist – namely, that it prove “keyword searches” are an effective method for finding infringement and/or that Shiji be aware that copyright owners will search for keywords embedded in the metadata to find infringement on the internet. Elias LLC misunderstands the district
3. Instances of infringement on the internet
According to Elias LLC, Shiji allegedly has a modus operandi of removing a photographer’s CMI “knowing that CMI [being removed] has likely directly resulted in infringement of the Elias Images.” In support of this argument, Elias LLC pointed to the infringing images that Mr. Elias found on non-party websites that had been stripped of his CMI.
There is a fundamental problem with this argument – there is no evidence linking Shiji’s actions of removing the photographs’ CMI with the instances of infringement Mr. Elias uncovered on the internet. See Stevens, 899 F.3d at 675 (explaining that to prevail, a plaintiff must “provide evidence from which one can infer that
Here, Elias LLC produced evidence, essentially, that his CMI-cleansed photographs appeared in at least two places on the
Elias LLC argues that this reasoning requires a
What’s more, we agree with the Ninth Circuit that the statute’s use of the future tense does not require a plaintiff to show that any specific infringement has already occurred and does not “require knowledge in the sense of certainty as to a future act.”
In short, the statute’s plain language requires some identifiable connection between the defendant’s actions and the infringement or the likelihood of infringement. To hold otherwise would create a standard under which the defendant would always know that its actions would “induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal” infringement because distributing protected images wrongly cleansed of CMI would always make infringement easier in some general sense. See Stevens, 899 F.3d at 673, 674 (finding that a mere showing of CMI removal, leading to the possibility that an infringer could use the photos undetected, is insufficient to meet Section 1202(b)’s second scienter requirement because “it simply identifies a general possibility that exists whenever CMI is removed” and
IV
For the reasons stated, we conclude that the district court properly granted summary judgment to Shiji on Elias LLC’s claim under the DMCA. Elias LLC did not meet its burden of coming forward with sufficient evidence demonstrating Section 1202(b)’s second scienter requirement, and judgment in Shiji’s favor was therefore appropriate. Accordingly, we affirm.
AFFIRMED.