Google and YouTube will have to deal with several more complainants in a lawsuit that accuses the video site of copyright infringement.

YouTube Lawsuit Gains More Plaintiffs

There is an important point to accusations made by the English Premier League and all of the new parties joining a lawsuit against YouTube. The word ‘encouraging’ has been carefully chosen to describe YouTube’s role in copyright infringement.

As Reuters noted the addition of the National Music Publishers’ Association, the Finnish Football League, and ‘Ishmael’ author Daniel Quinn add their names to the plaintiff list, we see a decision ultimately coming down to a court’s determination of the encouragement, or lack thereof, of copyright infringement.

Encouragement gains importance thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in MGM v Grokster. The justices concluded the defendants encouraged use of their service as a way to get around copyright laws to share work.

Google and YouTube have long held the position that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects their operation. When a content owner complains of something wrongly placed on YouTube, the service takes it down.

The court will have to decide if YouTube’s encouragement of sharing video is tantamount to saying, “go ahead and violate someone’s copyright.” Mark Cuban has long believed this, as do the plaintiffs in this suit.

If a judge believes this, we can’t see how YouTube or any video site could continue to allow any content uploading without checking every single posting. That possibility centers on how the court interprets encouragement to use the service.