In case anyone was wondering, YouTube hasn’t decided to wave a white flag with respect to the legal battle that Viacom started in early 2007. Indeed, lawyers representing the site have filed a new 94-page document defending YouTube’s approach to handling copyright infringement.
One quick reminder: YouTube already won this case once, with a court deciding last year that the site’s protected by the safe harbor of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Fresh papers are circulating only because Viacom decided to appeal the decision.
Otherwise, we’d just like to let everyone know that we’re not going to quote too extensively from the long, long “brief.” Both YouTube and Viacom seem to be past introducing much in the way of new evidence and/or new arguments at this point.
So here’s the simple conclusion at the end of the document: “YouTube, which has pioneered efforts to protect copyright while maintaining an open environment for creative, political, and personal expression, is exactly the kind of service that Section 512(c) was enacted to protect. The district court’s judgment should be affirmed.”
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Viacom responded by telling Eriq Gardner (who was the first person to publish Google’s legal brief), “Under the DMCA, content owners and systems operators share responsibility for the protection of copyrighted content online. It was never intended to absolve companies like YouTube from liability for building a business by deliberately infringing others’ creative works. We look forward to the review of this case by the court of appeals, and are confident that it will vindicate the rights of content creators.”
