Viacom and Google's $1 billion Lawsuit
A decision in the US district court has declared that Google-owned website YouTube is not guilty of copyright infringement when users post videos to the site without permission. The Court ruled that liability for copyright infringement only arises once a copyright owner makes YouTube aware of any illegal videos on its site and it fails to act to remove them from its site.
Viacom issued proceedings in 2007; it claimed that YouTube's business was based on copyright infringement and that it profited from the unauthorised use of its copyrighted material.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the US allows online service providers to avoid liability for hosting their users' illegal actions and absolves them of any duty to monitor their service for breaches of the law. Once companies are told of a breach in the law they must act quickly, to the extent they can, to remove the content or become accountable, according to the safe harbour provisions of the DMCA.
Viacom argued that safe harbour protection did not apply to Google because it knew that infringement was taking place on a massive scale. The Court held that it would be improper to hold Google and YouTube liable under federal copyright law merely for having a "general awareness" that videos might be posted illegally: "Mere knowledge of prevalence of such activity in general is not enough. That is consistent with an area of the law devoted to protection of distinctive individual works, not of libraries…The present case shows that the DMCA notification regime works efficiently…When Viacom over a period of months accumulated some 100,000 videos and then sent en masse takedown notice on February 2, 2007, by the next business day YouTube had removed virtually all of them".
The Court noted that previous cases had made it clear that the onus is on the owners of the copyright to find and identify infringing material, not the online service provider.
The Court rejected allegations by Viacom that YouTube was akin to file sharing entities such as Grokster or Lime Wire and that the same legal rules should apply in this case as did in earlier successful actions against those companies.
Viacom said it would appeal the ruling.
