In March 2007 Viacom decided to take action against YouTube. Viacom was frustrated by the amount of copyright infringing content that was appearing on Google’s video site.
The original filing included 160,000 examples of YouTube clips which Viacom stated had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times. Negotiations between Google and Viacom has apparently happened, but broke down, so Viacom took the next step.
Since then Google has been forced to hand over viewing data to the courts and this case has continued to roll on for the past 3 years. But yesterday Google reported that it had won.
In a posting on its blog Google stated that:
Today, the court granted our motion for summary judgment in Viacom’s lawsuit with YouTube. This means that the court has decided that YouTube is protected by the safe harbor of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) against claims of copyright infringement.
Google sees the judgement as clear evidence that online services are protected from such lawsuits if they actively work with copyright holders to manage their rights. The search giant also sees this as a very important victory that allows users to continue sharing content online.
Viacom obviously doesn’t see it that way and is going to appeal. The company’s response read as follows:
We believe that this ruling by the lower court is fundamentally flawed and contrary to the language of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the intent of Congress, and the views of the Supreme Court as expressed in its most recent decisions. We intend to seek to have these issues before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as soon as possible. After years of delay, this decision gives us the opportunity to have the Appellate Court address these critical issues on an accelerated basis. We look forward to the next stage of the process.
