When Viacom filed suit in March against YouTube, chiding the video-sharing site for “brazen” copyright infringement, intellectual-property gurus waited anxiously to see how the Web site would respond. Now they’ve got their answer.
Google, which owns the site, has filed a response in Viacom v. YouTube, and the company offers two main arguments in its defense, according to Ars Technica. First is fair-use doctrine, that thorny little piece of copyright law that allows reproduction of copyrighted works for noncommercial purposes like “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research.”
But Google’s other rebuttal may be its strongest. The company invokes the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s “safe harbor” provision, which holds that a Web site is not liable for any infringing material posted on it, as long as the site’s operators remove that material when asked to do so by a copyright holder.
As many video posters have found out, YouTube seems to do just that. Viacom will argue that the Web site unfairly requires copyright holders to search for infringing video clips, rather than taking the initiative itself. But that will be a tough sell, said Greg Gabriel, a copyright lawyer, to Ars Technica: “Viacom is asking [YouTube] to do something that the letter of the law does not require. Viacom is really asking the judge to do something extraordinary here.” —Brock Read
