Youtube Sued! Will Copyright Kill The Video Star?
UPDATE On June 23, 2010, almost 4 years after posting my video, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York published a substantive decision and came to the same conclusion that I did: Youtube was protected from copyright infringement claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) because Youtube acted promptly to take down infringing videos when it received proper notice from copyright owners. The court said that Youtube’s “general awareness” that infringing videos were on the site was not enough for Youtube to be liable for those infringements. The court emphasized throughout the opinion that Youtube is protected as long as it doesn’t know about (and ignore) specific infringements. The decision also emhasized, as I did, that Youtube is nothing like Grokster, which had been found to be a contributory copyright infringer. The court held that Youtube did not derive a direct financial benefit from infringing activity that it could control, because Youtube could not control activity of which it was not specifically aware. The court emphasized more than I did the “knowledge of specific infringements” point, and that also allowed the judge to more elegantly address the direct financial benefit point. Good job SDNY! (Of course, Judge Stanton had a voluminous record of facts to work from!) Despite these differences, my video is still a good summary of this case (and accurately predicted the outcome, so far.) Please note that Google is now in …