Harrington v. Pinterest — N.D. Cal. Holds DMCA § 512(c) Safe Harbor Covers Embedded UGC in Email and Push Notifications

Background

The plaintiff is a professional photographer whose images were uploaded to Pinterest by users without his permission. Pinterest’s product not only displays user-uploaded images on its core website and app, but also embeds those same images in promotional and engagement notifications — emails sent to users, in-app push messages, and mobile system notifications. The photographer alleged that, regardless of whether Pinterest could rely on DMCA § 512(c) for the core site, the use of his images outside the website — in notifications — constituted distribution and display by Pinterest itself, falling outside the safe harbor.

Pinterest moved for summary judgment, arguing that all of its notification mechanisms simply pull the same stored image files from Pinterest’s servers; the user’s email or push experience is just a different rendering pathway, not a separate act of storage or distribution.

The Court’s Holding

The court granted Pinterest summary judgment. It held that § 512(c)’s safe harbor for “storage at the direction of a user” protects content that is embedded in off-platform notifications, so long as the underlying files continue to reside on the service provider’s system or network and are accessed via in-line links from the notification.

The court adopted what it called an “output agnostic” reading of § 512(c). The statute protects user-uploaded content stored by the service provider; it does not condition that protection on a particular display channel. Whether a user views a Pinterest image by visiting pinterest.com, opening the Pinterest app, opening a Pinterest email, or seeing a push notification, the image is still being served from Pinterest’s storage. The court rejected the photographer’s effort to slice up Pinterest’s product into protected (website) and unprotected (notification) channels.

The court also drew on Ninth Circuit caselaw recognizing that hyperlinks and embedded references are not themselves separate acts of copying or distribution when the underlying file remains on the original host’s system. Notifications, in this view, are functionally analogous to an email containing a link.

Key Takeaways

• The DMCA § 512(c) safe harbor is not lost when an OSP delivers user-generated content through email and push notifications, provided the underlying files remain on the provider’s servers.
• The decision strengthens the “server test” line of authority: where the file lives, not how it is displayed, controls the copyright analysis.
• Plaintiffs trying to chip away at § 512(c) by isolating off-platform delivery vectors will face an uphill fight in the Ninth Circuit after this opinion.
• Companion to the Second Circuit’s recent Richardson v. Townsquare Media: the embedding-and-copyright debate is increasingly being resolved in favor of platforms when the underlying file storage lies with another party.

Why It Matters

This decision matters for any service that uses notifications as an engagement channel: social platforms, e-commerce marketplaces, content aggregators, news apps, and AI products that surface user content. The risk that ordinary product features — emails, pushes, app notifications — could pop content out of § 512(c) protection had been a quiet concern for OSP counsel. Harrington resolves that concern in the Ninth Circuit.

The opinion also adds a useful data point to the embedding-and-copyright debate that the Second Circuit recently revisited in Richardson v. Townsquare Media. The Ninth Circuit and the Northern District of California continue to lean strongly on the server test and on functional, output-agnostic readings of the safe harbors. As more litigation tries to push the boundaries of where stored content lives versus where it is rendered, this decision is a likely citation for OSP defendants.