Media conglomerate Viacom, owner of MTV, Nickelodeon, and Comedy Central among others, brought suit against YouTube regarding copyright protected programming that had made its way onto the streaming video site back in 2007. Last week, summary judgment was issued in favor of YouTube by Judge Louis Stanton in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York.
The case came down to the application of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), which includes a notification requirement that the court found protected YouTube in the case. Viacom had found roughly 100,000 protected videos on YouTube and sent a single notification asking YouTube to take down the videos. YouTube had removed almost all of the videos by the next business day. In the court’s opinion, this action by YouTube was in perfect compliance with the DMCA, and the DMCA process of notifying YouTube to remove the videos was a reasonable system for protecting against copyright infringement.
The court's ruling victory for YouTube, and ultimately Google (which owns YouTube) and other online content providers. For its part, Viacom has announced plans to appeal the ruling and policymakers in Washington are already looking at major updates to the DMCA, which is over a decade old and is considered by many to already be out-of-date with respect to changes in technology.
God, let's hope they don't make the DMCA worse than it already is...
Posted by: sineswiper | Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 12:09 PM