By FMC legal intern Michelle Davis

This just in (again): if you’re an online service provider and want to enjoy safe harbor protections under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), you’ve got to play by the rules.

That’s the lesson storage locker service Hotfile learned the hard way when it was sued by all five major motion picture studios (Disney Enterprises, Inc., Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Universal City Studios Productions LLLP, Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.) in the Southern District Court of Florida. U.S. District Court. In her ruling on Aug. 28 (and just recently made public), Judge Kathleen Williams found that Hotfile could be held liable for the infringing material users uploaded to its site.