Viacom International Inc. v. YouTube, Inc.

Viacom International, Inc. v. YouTube, Inc.
Court	United States District Court for the Southern District of New York
Decided	June 23, 2010
Citation(s)	No. 07 Civ. 2103
Holding
Google's motion for summary judgement was granted on the grounds that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's "safe harbor" provisions shielded Google from Viacom’s copyright infringement claims.
Court membership
Judge(s) sitting	Louis L. Stanton
Keywords
Copyright, Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Safe Harbor

Viacom International, Inc. v. YouTube, Inc., No. 07 Civ. 2103, is a U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York case in which Viacom sued Youtube, a video-sharing site owned by Google, alleging that Youtube had engaged in "brazen" and "massive" copyright infringement by allowing users to upload and view hundreds of thousands of videos owned by Viacom without permission. Google's motion for summary judgement was granted on the grounds that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's "safe harbor" provisions shielded Google from Viacom’s copyright infringement claims.

Background

On March 13, 2007, Viacom filed a US$1 billion lawsuit against Google and YouTube alleging that the site had engaged in "brazen" copyright infringement by allowing users to upload and view copyrighted material owned by Viacom. The complaint stated that over 150,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom’s programming, such as SpongeBob and The Daily Show, had been made available on YouTube, and that these clips had collectively been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.

Viacom claimed that Youtube had infringed on its copyrights by performing, displaying, and reproducing Viacom's copyrighted works. Furthermore, the complaint contended that the defendants "engage in, promote and induce" the infringement, and that they had deliberately built up a library of infringing works in order to increase the site's traffic (and advertising revenue). In total, Viacom claimed three counts of direct infringement, and three counts of indirect infringement, specifically inducement, contributory infringement and vicarious infringement. But at the same time Viacom was infringing the rights of many Youtube users by stealing and uploading their videos without permission.

Viacom did not seek damages for any actions after Google put its Content ID filtering system in place in early 2008. The lawsuit was later merged with similar complaints being pursued by the English Premier League and other copyright holders.

District Court proceedings

In July 2008, during the pre-trial discovery phase, Viacom won a court ruling requiring YouTube to hand over data detailing the viewing habits of every user who had ever watched videos on the site. The move led to concerns that the viewing habits of individual users could be identified through a combination of their IP addresses and log in names. The decision was criticized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which called the court ruling "a set-back to privacy rights," and privacy advocates such as Simon Davies, who stated that that the privacy of millions of YouTube users was threatened. Judge Louis Stanton dismissed the privacy concerns as "speculative", and ordered YouTube to hand over documents totaling around 12 terabytes of data. Judge Stanton held that because Youtube is not a "video tape service provider" as defined in the Video Privacy Protection Act, its users' data was not protected under the act. However, Judge Stanton rejected Viacom's request that YouTube hand over the source code of its search engine, saying that it was a "trade secret."

However, later in July 2008, Google and Viacom agreed to allow Google to anonymize all the data before handing it over to Viacom. The privacy deal also applied to other litigants including the English Premier League, the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization and the Scottish Premier League. However, the deal excepted employees of both the defendants and the plaintiffs, whose de-anonymized data was provided separately.

The employee data was later used in filings by both sides. Viacom cited internal emails sent among Youtube's founders discussing how to deal with clips uploaded to YouTube that were obviously the property of major media conglomerates. Google on the other hand stated that Viacom itself had "hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site" . Given this, Google argued that since Viacom and its lawyers were "unable to recognize that dozens of the clips alleged as infringements in this case were uploaded to YouTube with Viacom’s express authorization," that it was unreasonable to expect Google's employees to know which videos were uploaded without permission.

District Court ruling

On June 23, 2010, Judge Stanton ruled in Google's favor in a motion for summary judgment, holding that Google was protected by provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, notwithstanding evidence of intentional copyright infringement. The judge held that while the company undeniably had general knowledge that some copyrighted material had been uploaded by users, it did not know which clips had been uploaded with permission and which had not. He also said that mandating video-sharing sites to proactively police every uploaded video “would contravene the structure and operation of the D.M.C.A.” As evidence that the notification regime specified by the D.M.C.A. was effective, Judge Stanton noted that Youtube had successfully addressed a mass take-down notice issued by Viacom in 2007. The judge rejected Viacom's comparisons between YouTube and other Internet-based, media-sharing companies that had previously been found guilty of indirect copyright infringement.

Viacom announced its intention to appeal the ruling.