A recent Southern District of New York decision, Dow Jones & Co., Inc. v. Juwai Ltd., No. 21-CV-7284 (PKC), 2023 WL 2561588 (S.D.N.Y. 2023) held that the use of U.S. based servers suffices to apply U.S. copyright law to the uploading of the content.
Dow Jones owns and operates multiple news publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Mansion Global Barron's, and MarketWatch. It is the exclusive distributor of the content, and owns copyrights therein. Juwai Ltd. is a Chinese company based in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Dow Jones’ Complaint alleged that Juwai reproduced without authorization over one hundred articles from The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, and Mansion Global. The articles were either reproduced verbatim on the website, or translated from the original into Chinese. The Complaint charged copyright infringement and violations of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
Juwai moved to dismiss, arguing that as a Chinese company publishing a Chinese-language website it is beyond the reach of United States copyright laws. Relying on State St. Glob. Advisors Tr. Co. v. Visbal, 431 F. Supp. 3d 322, 339 (S.D.N.Y. 2020), the Dow Jones court held that there must be a “plus factor” – some additional nexus of the website to the United States. One such “plus factor” mentioned in dictum in State Street and alleged in the Dow Jones complaint is the causing of copies of the copyrighted content to be copied through loading to U.S. based internet servers.
Dow Jones specifically alleged in its complaint that Juwai used a cloud service named CloudFront (an Amazon-owned company), a content delivery service (CDN) that boasts that it increases website responsiveness and speed by storing copies, or caches, of a website's content on “edge servers” located across the globe. Users accessing a CloudFront-supported website like juwai.com will likely receive their data from the closest edge server. Dow Jones alleged that the juwai.com website has been repeatedly traced to servers in Seattle and Chicago. Since such allegations must be accepted
on a motion to dismiss, that sufficed to apply U.S.-based copyright law.
The Dow Jones decision expands the reach of U.S. copyright law on the internet, since the use of U.S. based servers, at least as part of global CDN services, is ubiquitous. Given that CDN’s tend to route content through the server nearest the user’s browser, the likelihood of content being copied to U.S.-based servers to provide content to U.S.-based browsers is very high.
Dow Jones owns and operates multiple news publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Mansion Global Barron's, and MarketWatch. It is the exclusive distributor of the content, and owns copyrights therein. Juwai Ltd. is a Chinese company based in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Dow Jones’ Complaint alleged that Juwai reproduced without authorization over one hundred articles from The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, and Mansion Global. The articles were either reproduced verbatim on the website, or translated from the original into Chinese. The Complaint charged copyright infringement and violations of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
Juwai moved to dismiss, arguing that as a Chinese company publishing a Chinese-language website it is beyond the reach of United States copyright laws. Relying on State St. Glob. Advisors Tr. Co. v. Visbal, 431 F. Supp. 3d 322, 339 (S.D.N.Y. 2020), the Dow Jones court held that there must be a “plus factor” – some additional nexus of the website to the United States. One such “plus factor” mentioned in dictum in State Street and alleged in the Dow Jones complaint is the causing of copies of the copyrighted content to be copied through loading to U.S. based internet servers.
Dow Jones specifically alleged in its complaint that Juwai used a cloud service named CloudFront (an Amazon-owned company), a content delivery service (CDN) that boasts that it increases website responsiveness and speed by storing copies, or caches, of a website's content on “edge servers” located across the globe. Users accessing a CloudFront-supported website like juwai.com will likely receive their data from the closest edge server. Dow Jones alleged that the juwai.com website has been repeatedly traced to servers in Seattle and Chicago. Since such allegations must be accepted
on a motion to dismiss, that sufficed to apply U.S.-based copyright law.
The Dow Jones decision expands the reach of U.S. copyright law on the internet, since the use of U.S. based servers, at least as part of global CDN services, is ubiquitous. Given that CDN’s tend to route content through the server nearest the user’s browser, the likelihood of content being copied to U.S.-based servers to provide content to U.S.-based browsers is very high.