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Legal
Documents released from Viacom/YouTube case
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 19 March 2010
A stack of court papers relating to the much previously reported YouTube/Viacom litigation have been released.
As previously reported, MTV-owners Viacom are suing YouTube over allegations they infringe copyright by allowing people to upload unlicensed content – including MTV content – to their website. YouTube and their owners Google argue that, because they take down unlicensed content whenever they are made aware of it, they are not liable for infringement under US copyright law. They also add that they have been busy developing filtering technology that automatically stops unlicensed content from ever appearing on the YouTube platform in the first place.
But Viacom aren’t impressed with those arguments. There seem to be two elements to the MTV owner’s legal case.
Firstly, they aren’t convinced the video service’s take-down system is enough to avoid liability for the infringement that occurs in the time between a video being uploaded and taken down (though other similar cases in the US have suggested it is).
Secondly, even if YouTube are operating within the law now, they weren’t when they first launched, and, Viacom argue, the service’s founders – Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim – deliberately encouraged infringement to occur on their website so to build traffic; traffic which enabled the $1.65 billion sale of the service to Google in 2006.
The legal squabble is ongoing. The previously confidential papers released this week don’t tell us much about the case, or give us any real indication as to what way the courts will go on this one, but there is some interesting stuff in the evidence presented by the two sides.
Viacom’s evidence includes various documents that aim to show YouTube’s founders knowingly allowed infringement to occur in order to build their business. One filing quotes an email from Chen which says the company should “concentrate all our efforts in building up our numbers as aggressively as we can through whatever tactics, however evil”, while other evidence seems to show Karim himself uploaded infringing content to better YouTube’s content offering.
Google officially deny that YouTube’s original team sanctioned or took part in rampant copyright infringement in the early days to build traffic, though it is true that large quantities of unlicensed content did appear on the video site at that time, and it took a while for said content to be taken down, even though it was obvious copyrights were being infringed.
However, YouTube argue memos and emails presented by Viacom as evidence take comments made by the company’s original management team out of context. They add that they have their own evidence that Viacom’s channels actually ignored a lot of the early copyright infringement because they recognised the promotional value of having videos on YouTube (and, indeed, they say MTV staffers even uploaded some of the infringing content). They also argue Viacom’s whole case against YouTube is based on sour grapes, because they have evidence the media firm was hoping to buy the video site just before Google swooped in with its mega-bucks takeover deal in 2006.
According to Billboard, YouTube’s legal reps have a slide from an internal Viacom presentation from before Google’s acquisition which says “we believe YouTube would make a transformative acquisition for MTV Networks/Viacom that would immediately make us the leading deliverer of video online, globally”.
As I say, all interesting stuff, though none of this really gives us any indication as to how judge Louis Stanton is likely to rule on this case when it reaches its resolution later this year.
