In early 2007, media giant Viacom demanded that Google take down copyrighted content from YouTube.
Afterwards, Viacom sued the site and its search giant owners for $1.2 billion USD, claiming Google facilitated the uploading the copyrighted videos through YouTube while doing little to deter it.
This week, Google has won the landmark case over the media companies, with a federal judge throwing out the lawsuit.
“Mere knowledge of prevalence of such activity in general is not enough,” writes Judge Louis Stanton. “The provider need not monitor or seek out facts indicating such activity.”
Viacom said it plans to appeal, calling the Judge’s ruling “fundamentally flawed,” as it does not reflect recent Supreme Court decisions.
The media giant is behind such hit channels like MTV and Comedy Central, and also owns the Paramount movie studio. A few of the shows that Viacom alleged were readily available on YouTube, in their entirety, were “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” “South Park,” and “SpongeBob SquarePants.”
Google had argued they were entitled to “safe harbor” protection under the DMCA, and it appears that Judge Stanton agreed.
Result for: comedy central
UPDATE: “Reports that EA SPORTS plans to sue the creators of South Park are false.”
On Wednesday, Comedy Central aired the first episode of South Park’s 14th season, dubbed “Sexual Healing” which revolved around Tiger Wood’s sex scandal as well as the video game Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11, which is set for a Q3 2010 release.
Today, Daily Informer is reporting that EA Sports, the publisher behind the Tiger Woods series is set to sue South Park writers Matt Stone and Trey Parker over their disgust of the episode.
The episode shows sequences from the upcoming golf game but also includes scenes of Tiger and wife Elin fighting, and even crashing his SUV into a tree. At the end of the episode, after Tiger has apologized to the media and the game returns to just playing golf, the kids of the show leave the game, calling it “boring again.”
While many fans found the ep funny, EA Sports did not and DI says their source at the company added that “soon after the airing of the episode the top beef were called in, even Peter Moore was informed of the situation. Before the episode aired the marketing folks were already worried, but now they have a lot more to worry about.”
Result for: comedy central
Hulu, one of the most popular online video streaming sites in the United States, had some bad news to note today, reporting that Viacom has pulled two of its most popular shows, “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report.”
“The Daily Show” is the third most-watched show on the site, and Colbert’s show usually ranks in the top 7.
Viacom does say that they will not be completely getting out of the streaming business, however.
Reads the press release:
Comedy Central has made “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report” available to consumers through Hulu since June 2008. Although that agreement has concluded, full-length episodes of each show will remain available at TheDailyShow.com and ColbertNation.com, respectively.
Hulu was one of the many digital distribution partners we’ve worked with over the past few years to add new outlets for our valuable and powerful content and to help drive the businesses of our partners. We had a great experience with Hulu, and we hope to work with its team again in the future.
Hulu has around 44 million monthly visitors.
