Dailymotion is continuing its steady march to legitimacy, signing with three French media rightsholders to legally use their material online. It’s won licenses from The Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers, Civic Society of Multimedia Authors and the French Collective Administration Organization for the Rights of Authors in the Visual Arts - each representing 45,000 stage and audiovisual authors, 25,000 documentary-makers and 80,000 graphic artists respectively, Variety reports. The site will return a proportion of ad income to the societies for each video view, but also gets exclusive access to the bodies’ material.

Such agreements are important for Dailymotion, which a court last year ordered to give a total €23,001 penalty to producers and distributors of a French movie its users had uploaded without permission. Dailymotion uses Audible (NSDQ: ADBL) Magic to detect infringing video clips but is also facing a €40 million copyright suit from TF1, which is also claiming €100 million from YouTube, specifically over uploading of episodes of the Heroes series, to which it owns rights.

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