• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, May 30, 2013

Siding with the humor site Cracked.com, a federal appeals court has dismissed a lawsuit accusing the company of infringing copyright by hosting nearly three dozen articles it didn't own.

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Demand Media's Cracked.com was entitled to prevail under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's safe harbor provisions. The safe harbors generally say that sites are immune from liability when users upload copyrighted material -- provided that the sites take down the material upon the owner's request.

The ruling upheld a decision by U.S. District Court Judge Kevin Castel in New York. “In short, the district court correctly determined that Demand Media was eligible for the user storage safe harbor,” a three-judge appellate panel wrote in its ruling, issued on Wednesday.

The appellate decision puts an end to a lawsuit filed in 2011 by Austin Obodai. He said that 32 of his articles were wrongly posted to Cracked.com by another user, who went by the name “socialway.”

Obodai did inform Cracked.com about the alleged infringement until after he filed the lawsuit, according to court records. When Cracked.com learned of Obodai's complaint the site took down the posts, according to Castel's June 2012 order dismissing the case. “The evidence establishes that the defendant expeditiously removed the infringing
works upon being notified of their publication,” Castel wrote.

Obodai, who represented himself in the matter, appealed Castel's decision to the 2nd Circuit. Obodai argued that Demand Media wasn't entitled to the safe harbors because it was “willfully blind” to infringement on its site. Obodai also argued that Cracked.com shouldn't be able to rely on the safe harbors because of its use of the analytics tool Tynt, which tells publishers when people cut and paste portions of articles.

The appellate court rejected all of Obodai's theories, specifically noting that Cracked.com's use of Tynt doesn't deprive it of the safe harbors.