NEW YORK — Entertainment companies may find it harder to keep movie and TV show clips from circulating for free online after a federal judge on Wednesday threw out Viacom’s hotly contested $1 billion copyright infringement suit against Google’s YouTube.
U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton said that the popular video website could not be held responsible when people post clips from productions such as Viacom’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Reportwithout the entertainment giant’s approval.
He rejected Viacom’s argument that YouTube’s business model depended on a sleight of hand: It attracts millions of visitors who want to see hit entertainment for free. Viacom said the site ensures that there’s plenty to see, without paying a license fee, by making it easy for users to post clips and hard for copyright owners to keep track of those posted without permission.
Every minute of the day, people post 24 hours’ worth of videos to YouTube, the ruling noted.
But Stanton said that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act includes a “safe harbor” provision. It was designed to relieve websites from the burden of checking user-generated material before it’s posted.
Even at YouTube, where lots of people violate the law, “mere knowledge of the prevalence of (copyright violations) in general is not enough” to make the site liable, Stanton said.
He also noted that the current system can work well. For example, on Feb. 2, 2007, Viacom identified 100,000 videos that it said violated its copyrights. By the next day, “YouTube had removed virtually all of them,” the judge said.
Viacom says it will appeal the ruling “as soon as possible.”
The company added, in a statement, that the ruling is “fundamentally flawed and contrary to the language of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the intent of Congress and the views of the Supreme Court.”
Other entertainment giants — including Disney, NBC Universal and Time Warner— as well as music publishers ASCAP and BMI wrote briefs supporting Viacom.
But Google general counsel Kent Walker, in a blog posting, said the decision “is an important victory not just for us, but also for the billions of people around the world who use the Web to communicate and share experiences.”
Groups that want to promote widespread Internet use also applauded the ruling, saying that most websites don’t have the resources to determine whether user-supplied videos violate the law.
“As the law now stands, prompt compliance with take-down notices shields an online service provider from liability,” says Sherwin Siy, deputy legal director of Public Knowledge, an activist group that encourages citizen access to media.
