On Tuesday Viacom filed a lawsuit against YouTube and Google for massive international copyright infringement. Yesterday Google responded by saying it is confident YouTube and all its other service offerings are strongly protected under current copyright law. The law they are referencing is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998.
The DMCA has been the legal standard for interpreting US copyright law in the online age. One of its provisions is limited liability for entities that block pirated material once they are notified of the infringement.
“Here there is a law which is specifically designed to give Web hosts such as us, or… bloggers or people that provide photo-album hosting online … the ’safe harbor’ we need in order to be able to do hosting online,” said Alexander Macgillivray, Google’s associate general counsel for products and intellectual property.
Macgillivray added that Google had done its homework with respect to the Viacom lawsuit, which also seeks to impose an injunction that would severely limit the content available on YouTube. He said that there are clear legal precedents in this case, and companies like Amazon and eBay have already qualified for safe harbor.
“We will never launch a product or acquire a company unless we are completely satisfied with its legal basis for operating,” Macgillivray told Reuters in an interview.
YouTubers needn’t worry just yet, Google is thus far defiant and seems to be willing to fight this thing, at least for the time being.
“We will continue to innovate and continue to host material for people, without being distracted by this suit.”
I hope that Google has the gut to see this through to the end, because a verdict on behalf of the defendant in this case could completely revolutionize the preconceived notions of what is or isn’t copyright infringement, and would increase the amount of content exponentially.