When a copyright complaint was filed in the Southern District of New York in May against YouTube, Inc. and its parent Google Inc., a clutch of infrequent bedfellows were juxtaposed: First, “copyright infringement” and “class action” are two terms that do not typically roll off the tongue together as they do, for example, in “securities class actions” or “product liability class actions.” Second, the two lead plaintiffs for the proposed class do not appear to have much in common: The Premier League of English Soccer, with billions of dollars of viewership value, has soccer matches that are shown in more than 200 countries to audiences exceeding 2.5 billion people, while much smaller Bourne Co. is one of the few remaining independent music publishers, owning popular standards such as “Unforgettable” and “Smile.” And third, at least on the face of it, the law firms representing the proposed class are something of an odd couple: Proskauer Rose, a well-regarded international law firm, but hardly a household name when it comes to plaintiffs’ contingency-fee class actions, and Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossman, more typically associated with representing plaintiffs in securities class actions against companies such as WorldCom. Observing all this, The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog was reminded of Bill Murray’s comment in Ghostbusters: “Cats and dogs living together?”
In fact, this all makes eminent sense. In our view, the copyright infringement of thousands of different copyrighted works on YouTube, the rights to which are owned by as many different copyright holders, led us to pursue a strategy that, while superficially strange, is designed to achieve the industry reshaping we believe federal law supports.
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