YouTube Viacom Lawsuit:Google Wins – Google was able to win a ruling when a judge threw out a $1 billion lawsuit. The lawsuit was brought agaianst Google by Viacom. They accused Google of allowing copyrighted material on its YouTube service without the proper permission. The lawsuit mostly referred to popular songs that are posted to the service as videos. Many users use these videos as a “song search” and are able to play the songs using the service.

The judge said that Google could not be held liable for having a “general awareness” that the videos had been illegally posted to their website. Google maintained that they did their best to clean up the videos at a rapid pace, but have been unable to get to them all.

Google and YouTube reveales that they were entitled to “safe harbor” under the digital copyright law. This law states that they must have notice of the particular offenses that are made on their huge platform before they are required to act.

Because YouTube did remove all of the material that was reported to them, they were in the clear. The responsibility falls on Viacom to monitor the uploading of their own copyrighted material to the YouTube site and other sites, and not YouTube’s responsibility to check every video for copyrighted material.
The site has implemented a number of tools, including song recognizing capability to deal with the copyrighted material being placed on their website. While they could do more to stop the spreading of copyrighted material on their site, they have apparently made enough effort to hold up their end of the bargain.
After the ruling, Viacom said that the ruling was “fundamentally flawed,” and vowed that the suit would not be the end of the battle between the two giant mega-corporations.