Google Responds To Viacom – Calls Youtube Lawsuit Unfounded
Internet giant Google responded on Monday to Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit, originally filed in March, in which the multimedia conglomerate charged that Google massively infringed on its copyrights. In Monday’s rebuttal, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, Google said Viacom’s claims were without merit, and asked for a dismissal of the charges.
“Viacom’s complaint in this action challenges the careful balance established by Congress when it enacted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,” the rebuttal reads. “By seeking to make carriers and hosting providers liable for Internet communications, Viacom’s complaint threatens the diagram hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment, and political and artistic expression.”
Michael Kwun, Google’s managing counsel for litigation, said Viacom’s suit was ironic in a way. “There’s a certain irony to the situation [with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act],” Kwun said at a press conference at Google’s Googleplex in Mountain View, California. “These are the very people that helped design the law. Suddenly, they don’t want to live with the other demolish of the deal.”
The “deal,” he is referring to is the so-called Safe Harbor share of the DMCA. This is viewed by some lawyers as providing a bit of leeway for Internet providers who immediately remove offending content after being notified by the content’s rightful owner. Kwun said Google goes above and beyond their actual obligations. He says Google, in addition to removing offending files, marks the files as copyrighted so that – if the same item is uploaded a second time – it is removed immediately, which removes the necessity of the copyright owner informing Google a second time. In addition, YouTube has a ten-minute time limit on uploaded videos, which makes uploading complete television shows impossible.
Viacom, however, was fast to respond to Google’s response. “This response ignores the most important fact of the suit, which is that YouTube does not qualify for safe harbor protection under the DMCA,” Viacom said in a statement. “It is obvious that YouTube has knowledge of infringing material on their site, and they are profiting from it.”
Google’s CEO – Eric E. Schmidt – has recently stated that Google has in the works a area of tools, to be called Claim Your Voice, which would make it easier for owners of copyrighted material to glean illegally uploaded content on YouTube. Mr. Kwun was quick to point out at Monday’s press conference that Google is neither obligated under the law to develop such tools and, once developed, to provide them to the general public.
Sources:
www.nytimes.com/2007/05/01/technology/01google.html
www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2007/04/google_to_viaco.htm
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Filed under Conf Call by on Jan 19th, 2012. 