A judge in the United States has thrown out a $1 billion (£680 million) lawsuit brought by Viacom that accused Google of allowing copyrighted videos to appear on YouTube without permission.
The landmark ruling comes three years after the US media company sued YouTube, arguing that the content-sharing website had hosted more than 60,000 copyrighted videos without permission.
Viacom accused YouTube, bought by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion, of “wilful blindness” to the copyright theft.
“Fostering and countenancing this piracy were central to YouTube’s economic business model,” Viacom said.
Under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, service providers such as YouTube are protected from copyright claims as long as they promptly remove infringing material when notified about a violation.
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Viacom’s lawsuit was merged with a similar complaint pursued by the English Premier League, which said that football clips were routinely posted on YouTube without permission.
YouTube, however, said that it always took down copyrighted material when alerted by the owners of the content.
Google argued that it should not be held responsible for policing content before it was placed on the site by users. In a 30-page ruling, District Judge Louis Stanton, sitting in New York, agreed, saying that it would be improper to hold Google and YouTube liable for having a “general awareness” that videos might be posted illegally.
“Mere knowledge of prevalence of such activity in general is not enough,” he wrote. “The provider need not monitor or seek out facts indicating such activity.”
The judge noted that Viacom had spent months accumulating about 100,000 clips violating its copyright, and then sent a mass takedown notice on February 2, 2007.
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By the next business day, he said, YouTube had removed virtually all of them. Viacom said that it planned to appeal.
Viacom had sought to portray YouTube as the video equivalent of Napster, the hugely popular music site that was closed after a judge ordered it to stop transmitting copyrighted tracks.
The New York-based company is controlled by Sumner Redstone and owns cable networks such as MTV and Comedy Central as well as the Paramount film studio.
“These issues are really important for content creators to protect their intellectual property against the usage by online aggregators,” Laura Martin, an analyst for Needham & Co, said.
“It is really important for content creators to get paid. This is the beginning, not the end. Sumner won’t roll over and die on this.”
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Google and other web companies, including Facebook and Yahoo!, argued that a judgment against YouTube would require thousands of websites that host user-generated content to screen content, effectively destroying their business models with crushing legal liabilities.
Kent Walker, Google’s general counsel, wrote on the company’s blog that the ruling was “an important victory not just for us, but also for the billions of people around the world who use the web to communicate and share experiences.”