A federal judge handed Google Inc a major victory on Wednesday by rebuffing media company Viacom Inc’s attempt to collect more than US$1 billion in damages for the alleged copyright abuses of Google’s popular YouTube service.
The ruling by US District Judge Louis Stanton in New York embraces Google’s interpretation of a 12-year-old law that shields Internet services from claims of copyright infringement as long as they promptly remove illegal content when notified of a violation.
That so-called “safe harbor” helped persuade Google to buy YouTube for US$1.76 billion in 2006, even though some of the Internet search leader’s own executives had earlier branded the video-sharing service as “a ‘rogue enabler’ of content theft,” according to documents unearthed in the copyright infringement case.
Viacom, the owner of popular cable channels such as MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, called Stanton’s decision “fundamentally flawed” and vowed to appeal. That virtually ensures a legal brawl that has already dragged on for more than three years will spill into next year and perhaps beyond.
“Copyright protection is essential to the survival of creative industries,” Viacom’s general counsel Michael Fricklas said. “It is and should be illegal for companies to build their businesses with creative material they have stolen from others.”
The bitter battle revolves around Viacom’s allegations that YouTube built itself into the Internet’s most watched video site by milking unlicensed use of copyright-protected clips stolen from professionally produced show such as Viacom’s The Colbert Report and The Daily Show.
The pirated material came from the millions of people who have uploaded clips to YouTube since its 2005 inception. About 24 hours of new video is posted to YouTube every minute.
YouTube’s whirlwind success led to the Google sale that generated huge windfalls for the video channel’s founders, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen (陳士駿) and Jawed Karim.
In dismissing the lawsuit before a trial, Stanton said that Viacom had spent several months accumulating about 100,000 videos violating its copyright and then sent a mass takedown notice on Feb. 2, 2007. By the next business day, Stanton said, YouTube had removed virtually all of them.
Stanton said there’s no dispute that “when YouTube was given the [takedown] notices, it removed the material.”
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