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: supreme court
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has announced, jointly with the Congressional members of the International Anti-Piracy Caucus (IAPC) the first ever Notorious Illegal Sites list, calling out the six most “notorious” sites used for unauthorized downloads of music, movies and other copyrighted works.
Additionally, the groups named Russia, Mexico, China, Canada and Spain as the “Top Priority Countries” for lax anti-piracy efforts.
The sites to make the list are: China’s Baidu, Canada’s IsoHunt, Ukraine’s mp3fiesta, Germany’s RapidShare, Luxembourg’s RMX4U.com and Sweden’s The Pirate Bay.
The groups say these sites and their services provide little other uses than an exchange of unauthorized copyrighted works.
“The release of this report casts a damning spotlight once again on several nations with lax copyright protections and websites that brazenly traffic in copyright theft. I’m particularly struck by the IAPC decision to identify significant global websites that facilitate massive theft; theft that destroys jobs and cuts short the dreams of creators who find it more difficult to attract the capital they need to build their careers. Just last week, five years after the 9-0 Supreme Court landmark decision against Grokster, we saw a federal judge rule against the most significant theft machine in this country – LimeWire. While it took some time for the judicial process to work, we did see that in a nation of laws, those who set up elegant schemes to profit from theft will be stopped. There is basic accountability, although much work needs to be done to achieve a fully accountable Internet space,” says Mitch Bainwol, Chairman and CEO, RIAA.
Result for: supreme court
The once-extremely popular file sharing service LimeWire has been found liable of copyright infringement today in a 4-year-old lawsuit brought against them by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) threatening to put the final nail in the company’s coffin.
U.S. District Judge Kimba M. Wood noted that users of LimeWire perform “a substantial amount of copyright infringement” and that LimeWire “has not taken meaningful steps to mitigate infringement.”
The RIAA’s lawsuit was seeking up to $150,000 USD per infringement, and the suit alleged that 93 percent of LimeWire’s traffic was unauthorized file sharing. At its peak, LimeWire had 50 million unique users.
Adds the RIAA (via Wired): “LimeWire is one of the largest remaining commercial peer-to-peer services. Unlike other P2P services that negotiated licenses, imposed filters or otherwise chose to discontinue their illegal conduct following the Supreme Court’s decision in the Grokster case, LimeWire instead thumbed its nose at the law and creators.”
The RIAA and LimeWire will meet again with Judge Kimba Wood on June 1 to see how to proceed.
Read the full decision here: RIAA v. LimeWire.
