Viacom to Appeal YouTube Copyright Ruling

Viacom said it will appeal a federal judge’s order granting Google’s motion for summary judgment in their long-running YouTube copyright litigation. “We believe that the ruling by the lower court 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 expressed in its most recent decisions,” Viacom said. “After years of delay, this decision gives us the opportunity to have the Appellate Court address these critical issues on an accelerated basis."

Google sees the judge’s ruling as “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 with each other,” Google Vice President and General Counsel Kent Walker wrote on the official YouTube blog. Viacom had alleged that YouTube violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act because it knew it hosted infringing material on the video sharing site.

But the key question in the case was whether the “statutory phrases ‘actual knowledge that the material or an activity using the material on the system or network is infringing,’ and ‘facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent’ … mean a general awareness that there are infringements (here, claimed to be widespread and common), or rather mean actual or constructive knowledge of specific and identifiable infringements of individual items,” U.S. District Court, Manhattan Judge Louis Stanton, wrote in his opinion. “To let knowledge of a generalized practice of infringement in the industry, or of a proclivity of users to post infringing materials, impose responsibility on service providers to discover which of their users’ postings infringe a copyright would contravene the structure and operation of the DMCA,” he said.

Public Knowledge praised the ruling. “The burden to point out allegations of infringement is with the content provider, and the burden of taking down material lies with the service provider,” said Sherwin Siy, Public Knowledge deputy legal director. “Had Viacom won the this case, that burden would have been shifted dramatically,” he said.