What does YouTube legal win mean?

Posted by Paul Johnson in Breaking News on June 25, 2010  |  0 Comments More from this author  |    |  Follow Paul Johnson on: LinkedIn | Twitter |

In short, it means Viacom finally get the chance to take this long running case to a higher court, and YouTube continue to strengthen their position in becoming a user generated and premium content gateway to multiple platforms...something that would work in their favour once Google TV is launched.

At the same time that ComScore released its May online video rankings to confirm that YouTube still sits at the top after racking up a record 14.6 billion video views (an 11.5% increase on April), Viacom lost its long running copyright dispute against YouTube.

Despite written support from other media giants such as Disney, NBC Universal and Time Warner, New York Judge Louis Stanton threw out the case based on the premise that

"…the popular video website could not be held responsible when people post clips from productions such as Viacom’s ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and ‘The Colbert Report’ without the entertainment giant’s approval…mere knowledge of the prevalence of (copyright violations) in general is not enough to make the site liable".

This ruling was primarily based upon the 'safe harbor' provision in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is summed up nicely by Mike Berkley of Comcast:

"The "safe harbor" provision basically says that a content host (such as YouTube) can't be held liable for copyright or redistribution infringements committed by its users, as long as the host had no prior knowledge of the infringement and quickly responds to take-down notices submitted by the content owners."

Stanton recognised that the 'safe habor' provision works well and used the example that on Feb. 2, 2007, Viacom identified 100,000 videos that it said violated its copyrights which, by the next day, "YouTube had removed virtually all of them".

Viacom says it will appeal the ruling "as soon as possible". The company added in a statement, that the ruling

“... by the lower court is fundamentally flawed and contrary to the language of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act […] We intend to seek to have these issues before the US 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.”

Kent Walker of Google meanwhile is lapping up the ruling on behalf of the people, saying

[the ruling] "...is an important victory not just for us, but also for the billions of people around the world who use the Web to communicate and share experiences."