Today a federal judge in New York granted
YouTube’s
motion for summary judgment in the closely-watched Viacom v. YouTube copyright case.
Viacom sued YouTube for copyright
infringement over the
appearance of video clips on YouTube over which Viacom claimed the
copyright. (It was later revealed
that many of those clips were secretly uploaded by dozens of Viacom
marketers.) YouTube argued that it was protected by
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s safe
harbors. Generally, those safe
harbors, enacted in 1998, limit remedies against online services so long
as they
respond to “takedown requests” – that is, expeditiously disable access
to
allegedly infringing content when a copyright holder complains that
particular
content available on the service infringes its rights.
YouTube complied with thousands of
Viacom takedown requests,
but Viacom nevertheless argued the safe harbor shouldn’t apply to
YouTube,
since it had “generalized” knowledge of online infringement. The court
rejected Viacom’s argument,
pointing out that YouTube removes numerous clips at Viacom’s request,
including
100,000 within one business day, consistent with the DMCA.
This decision shows that the DMCA safe
harbors are working,
and that Congress struck the proper balance, by providing robust
protection for
creators who think their copyrights are infringed, while still allowing
platforms
for expression to flourish online.
As today’s decision notes, it is nearly
impossible for
platforms that host user-created content to differentiate between
authorized
and unauthorized content, and infringing content and non-infringing
content. People are sometimes surprised to learn
that due to our lack of copyright ‘formalities’, there’s nowhere to look
to
determine with any certainty who has rights to what. Only rightsholders
know that, and thus only rightsholders
know what to take down. The DMCA’s
Solomon-like compromise, therefore, was to assign to rightsholders the
burden
of coming forward with a specific complaint about infringement, and to
assign
to ISPs and online services the burden of responding to that complaint.
Today’s decision reflects exactly that
result.
