Court Restarts $1 Billion Copyright Lawsuit Against YouTube

Josh Smith

Viacom’s $1 billion copyright infringement case against YouTube is back from the dead after an appeals court ruled on Thursday that the lawsuit could go forward.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed a 2010 ruling by a lower court that dismissed the case after concluding YouTube was not responsible for infringing content.

The lawsuit is one of many fronts in a battle between content producers and online distributors over responsibility for preventing piracy. Entertainment companies have pushed Congress to make websites like YouTube and Google more accountable for content that users upload.

Viacom sued YouTube, which is owned by Google, in 2007 over thousands of clips that users uploaded to YouTube from Viacom TV channels such as MTV and Comedy Central. Viacom on Thursday praised the ruling as “a definitive, common sense message” that tells website operators they can’t ignore pirated content.

But YouTube says it promptly took down infringing content after it was notified. On Thursday, the company said the case now rests on a very small number of clips.

“All that is left of the Viacom lawsuit that began as a wholesale attack on YouTube is a dispute over a tiny percentage of videos long ago removed from YouTube,” the company said in a statement. “Nothing in this decision impacts the way YouTube is operating. YouTube will continue to be a vibrant forum for free expression around the world."

Despite reviving the case, the court took a nuanced view that dismissed many of Viacom’s claims, said Public Knowledge Deputy Legal Director Sherwin Siy.

“The Court upheld the basic principles of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,” Siy said in a statement. “Crucially, the Court rejected Viacom's attempt to create a new duty of those hosting content to monitor actively for infringement in order to qualify for the law's safe-harbor provisions. The Court upheld the need for knowledge of specific instances of infringement in the DMCA, and that a general awareness of possible infringement is not sufficient."

With the court’s support of current legal standards, the question becomes how much YouTube employees knew and when they knew it, he said.