Google not liable for copyright infringement by YouTube users

Google has fended off a US$1 billion lawsuit brought against it by entertainment giant Viacom and other content providers, who claimed that the online services giant should be liable for the unauthorised sharing of copyright material on the popular video-sharing site, YouTube. The US offers protection as in the European Union for web sites whose users share user-generated content provided that the service provider did not know about the infringing material. Upon discovery, the service provider needs to remove the offending material quickly. Here, though, Viacom argued that Google was aware that infringing material was being shared on its site on a massive scale and so the defence should not apply.

The US District Court for the Southern District of New York disagreed with Viacom. District Judge Louis Stanton said: ‘Mere knowledge of prevalence of such activity in general is not enough. The provider need not monitor or seek out facts indicating such activity.’ As such, Google was entitled to the safe harbour protection as it had had insufficient notice of any particular infringements. The ruling said that the case showed how well Google’s take-down facility worked, because Viacom had accumulated 100,000 videos over several months and nearly all of them were disabled the day after Viacom had notified Google of them. Responsibility to find and identify infringing material was the copyright holder’s and not the online service provider’s.

Google has described the victory as important not just for itself but also its millions of users around the world who want to enjoy the benefits that Web 2.0 brings.