According to the Google
blog, Google-owned YouTube has won their landmark legal case against Viacom, Google calling it an "important victory" that protects "the billions of people around the world who use the web to communicate." In short, the court declared that YouTube is protected by the safe harbor of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) against claims of copyright infringement. More, the court ruled that the system in place now (where YouTube responds to DMCA take down requests) works just fine. From the
summary judgment:
Indeed, 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 one mass take-down notice on February 2, 2007, by the next business day YouTube had removed virtually all of them.
Viacom had previously accused YouTube and Google of "brazen" wholesale copyright infringement despite YouTube's best efforts (efforts that often seem to
far exceed common sense) to quickly pull down infringing content. As groups like the
EFF have long argued, Viacom's primary motivation was protecting dying business models in the face of evolution, using an increasingly myopic (some would argue psychotic) U.S. copyright system.
Of course while YouTube won this case, there appear to be a
vast ocean of draconian copyright legislation looming over yonder horizon -- with the full support of the U.S. government.
