Viacom sued Google, the owner of video sharing website YouTube, in March 2007, seeking over $1 billion in damages and an injunction barring YouTube from further infringement of its copyrighted content.
Viacom accused YouTube of hosting 62,637 infringing clips on YouTube’s video sharing site.
But the US District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled on Wednesday that YouTube met the requirements for protection under the safe harbour provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
“Defendants designated an agent, and when they received specific notice that a particular item infringed a copyright, they swiftly removed it,” wrote Judge Louis Stanton in his decision.
Stanton said that, according to the terms of the DMCA, “mere knowledge” of prevalence of infringing activity on a service provider’s site is not enough to preclude DMCA protection.
The judge continued: “If a service provider knows (from notice from the...