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YouTube.com legal fight 'threatens net' According to Google.com 6-18-2008 |
Google has announced that a one billion dollar lawsuit against YouTube threatens internet freedom. |
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Viacom says it has identified 150,000 unauthorized clips on YouTube. In
court documents Google's lawyers say the action "threatens the way hundreds of
millions of people legitimately exchange information" over the web The search giant's legal team also maintained that YouTube had been faithful to
the requirements of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act and that they
responded properly to claims of infringement. In papers submitted to a
Manhattan court, Google said it and YouTube "goes far beyond its legal
obligations in assisting content owners to protect their works". Viacom
disagreed that either firm had lived up to that standard and said that they had
done "little or nothing" to stop infringement.
In a rewritten lawsuit filed last month, Viacom claimed YouTube consistently
allowed unauthorised copies of popular television programming and movies to be
posted on its website and viewed tens of thousands of times. It said it
had identified more than 150,000 such abuses which included clips from shows
such as South Park, SpongeBob SquarePants and MTV Unplugged. Interview
with one of the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley, first broadcast on 21 May
2007 The company says the infringement also included the documentary An
Inconvenient Truth which had been viewed "an astounding 1.5 billion times".
Viacom, which is asking for damages for the unauthorised viewing of its
programming, said its tally represented only a fraction of the content on
YouTube that violates its copyrights. "The availability on the YouTube site
of a vast library of the copyrighted works of plaintiffs and others is the
cornerstone of defendants' business plan," Viacom said. Viacom
originally started legal action last year and filed an amended version last
month. Earlier this month Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone told Dow Jones: "When
we filed this lawsuit, we not only served our own interests, we served the
interests of everyone who owns copyrights they want protected." He
added: "We cannot tolerate any form of piracy by anyone, including
YouTube...they cannot get away with stealing our products." For its
part, Google said the only way the legal action would be resolved was in court.
Google's vice president of content partnerships David Eun has said: "We're
going all the way to the Supreme Court. We've been very clear about it."
After the legal action was first started, YouTube launched an
anti-piracy tool that checks uploaded videos against the original content in an
effort to flag piracy.
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