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May 1, 2007

According to various news sources, Google has officially responded to Viacom's $1 billion copyright lawsuit yesterday, arguing that it has not infringed on the rights of Viacom, and that the suit threatens the viability of its popular YouTube video-sharing site as well as others similar to it.

Michael Kwun, managing counsel for litigation at Google, said "we think YouTube offers the world's leading platform for entertainment, education and free speech. We're not going to let this lawsuit distract us from our original plans."

Last month, Viacom sued Google for $1 billion, alleging that the search giant's video-sharing site YouTube was infringing on copyrights.

To answer that lawsuit, Google said it is protected by the 1998 DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and says Viacom's lawsuit blatently threatens video-sharing sites.

In an official response filed with U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York, Google said: "By seeking to make carriers and hosting providers liable for Internet communications, Viacom's complaint threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment, political and artistic expression."

In 2006, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock.

"There is a certain irony to the lawsuit. Viacom and others were at the table when the DMCA was adopted. These are the very people who helped design this law," Kwun added. "They are getting material taken down quickly and yet, suddenly, they don't want to live with the other end of the deal."

Handling Google's defense in the lawsuit are Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto, Calif., and Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott in Chicago, which represented President Bush in his appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court that stopped the recount of ballots in Florida from the 2000 presidential election. That decision handed the victory to Bush instead of former Vice President Al Gore.

Yesterday, Viacom denied that YouTube qualifies for protection under the DMCA, arguing that the company has prior knowledge of infringing material and is also profiting from pirated works.

"It's clearly obvious that YouTube has knowledge of infringing material on their site and they are profiting from it," Viacom said in a statement. "It is simply not credible that a company whose mission is to organize the world's information claims that it can't find what's on YouTube."

YouTube provides copyright protection tools to help copyright owners find uploaded clips that may infringe on the content creator's rights, Google said. The tools can prevent the reloading of copies of the same video clip after it has been removed from YouTube, the filing said.

Google's CEO Eric Schmidt said at the National Broadcasters Association conference in early March that the company was nearly ready to turn on a tool called "Claim Your Content" that will automatically identify copyright material so that it can be removed faster.

Google offers "best of breed tools" for protecting copyright owners, primarily for identifying content on its site that copyright owners have complained about, Kwun said. Google can't identify allegedly infringing content and block it or prevent it from being posted, he said.

"We already have in place a digital hash blocking system" that identifies the digital "fingerprint" of content that has been removed for copyright reasons."

Kwun added" in addition, YouTube prevents the uploading of any video longer than 10 minutes, a function designed to prevent pirating of full-length TV shows, movies and other copyrighted content, he said.

A case management conference is scheduled for July 27 and the judge may set the initial case schedule at that time, Kwun said.

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Source: C-Net News