Composer Maria Schneider Says Trial Over YouTube Anti-Piracy Tools Must Be Postponed

A Grammy Award-winning composer who is suing YouTube over access to its anti-piracy tools is now asking a federal appeals court to postpone her looming trial, filing an emergency motion that says the upcoming proceedings will be “enormously wasteful.”

With a trial set to kick off next week, Maria Schneider asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Monday to “stay” the proceedings, arguing she needs time to litigate her appeal that seeks to overturn a ruling last month that refused to let the case proceed as a class action.

Schneider says that decision, which means the case will not include tens of thousands of other copyright owners, was not only “manifestly erroneous” but also came “only three weeks before trial” – a sudden change that “gravely undermines” the goals of her case.

“The named plaintiffs here joined the case to litigate class claims, and to vindicate their view that YouTube tramples on the rights of independent artists and smaller copyright holders overall, not just those of the individual plaintiffs,” her lawyers told the appeals court.

“A brief stay here to allow this court to … ensure that the district court’s last-minute, haphazard, and erroneous conclusion that this case cannot be tried on a classwide basis does not endanger the progress of this litigation,” Schneider’s attorneys wrote.

Schneider’s lawsuit claims that YouTube has become a “hotbed of piracy” because the platform provides “powerful copyright owners” like record labels with tools including Content ID to block and monetize unauthorized uses of their content, but fails to do the same for “ordinary owners.” She says songwriters and other smaller rights holders are forced instead to use “vastly inferior and time-consuming manual means” of policing infringement, allowing piracy of their material to flourish.

For its part, YouTube says it has done nothing wrong. In court documents, the company has argued that it’s spent “spent over $100 million developing industry-leading tools” to prevent piracy, but that it limits access because “in the hands of the wrong party, these tools can cause serious harm.”

The case was filed as a class action, aiming to let potentially tens of thousands of aggrieved copyright owners team up to fight what Schneider’s lawsuit called “institutionalized misbehavior.” An expert retained by her legal team said the class could include between 10,000 and 20,000 rightsholders.

But in a May 22 ruling, Judge James Donato refused to “certify” the case as a class action, dramatically reducing the scope of the lawsuit. Under federal law, class-action accusers must share very similar legal concerns – and the judge said Schneider’s fellow rightsholders would have widely different cases against YouTube.

“It has been said that copyright claims are poor candidates for class-action treatment, and for good reason,” the judge wrote at the time. “Every copyright claim turns upon facts which are particular to that single claim of infringement [and] every copyright claim is also subject to defenses that require their own individualized inquiries.”

Following that ruling Schneider quickly moved to postpone the trial, which is set to kick off on June 12, while she launched an appeal. But at a hearing days after the ruling, Judge Donato said he would stick to the schedule: “I’m not going to do that. You got a trial set on June 12th. This is a 2020 case; okay. It’s showtime.”

In Monday’s emergency petition to the appeals court, Schneider’s lawyers argued that such a decision was unfair, forcing them to proceed to an expensive trial when the ruling on class certification might later be overturned on appeal.

“The class should not be forced into a situation where an appellate victory would be illusory, placing them back at square one, and the fruits of three years of hard-fought litigation evaporate even when the district court’s failure to certify a class has been confirmed as erroneous,” her lawyers wrote.

A response to the emergency motion from Google is due by the end of Wednesday.

Read the entire petition here: