Handing Google a sweeping victory, a federal judge on Wednesday dismissed Viacom's three-year-old copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube. Viacom had alleged that YouTube infringed copyright because the site allegedly contained tens of thousands of copyrighted clips uploaded by users. But U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton in New York ruled that Google was protected by the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which broadly state that sites are immune from copyright infringement liability for material uploaded by users as long as the sites remove the material upon request. Viacom said it intends to appeal "as soon as possible."
Stanton also rejected Viacom's position that YouTube was comparable to the peer-to-peer company Grokster. In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Grokster was liable because it intentionally induced copyright infringement. Stanton wrote that Grokster wasn't comparable to YouTube because YouTube removed infringing clips upon request.
YouTube is at least the second video-sharing site to prevail in a copyright infringement lawsuit. Last year, a federal judge in Los Angeles dismissed a lawsuit by Universal Music Group against video-sharing site Veoh, ruling that the site qualified for the DMCA safe harbors. That judge ruled that the DMCA doesn't require sites to proactively police for piracy; rather, sites need only remove infringing clips upon owners' requests.
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