New York — Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit in violation of copyright demanding YouTube’s ability to maintain copyrighted material off its popular video-sharing site “threatens to what extent hundreds of millions of people lawfully exchange all kinds of information over the Internet,” YouTube owner Google Inc. said.
Google’s lawyers asserted in papers filed late Friday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan as the company took action in response to Viacom Inc.’s latest lawsuit claiming that the Internet has led to “an explosion of copyright infringement” by YouTube and others.
Google states the danger comes from Viacom’s latest effort to make “carriers and hosting providers” liable for what people post. Google, by the way, has said this suit will only be resolved in court.
The discussions between the two sides has escalated ever since Viacom originally filed its lawsuit last year and filed an amended version last month, saying that the video-sharing site YouTube consistently allows popular, copyrighted material to be posted to its site, including unauthorized viewing of its programming from MTV, Comedy Central and other networks, as well as such hits as “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”
Viacom alleged that it has recognized more than 150,000 unauthorized clips of copyrighted programming including — “SpongeBob SquarePants,” “South Park” and “MTV Unplugged” episodes and the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” — that had been viewed “an astounding 1.5 billion times,” and that the site has done “little or nothing” to stop the copyright violation, the AP reported.
In papers put forward to a judge late Friday, Google said that YouTube “goes extremely beyond its legal responsibilities in assisting content owners to protect their works.”
Google further said that Viacom is seeking to hold carriers and hosting providers liable for online communications “threatens in what manners hundreds of millions of people legally swap information, news, entertainment and political and artistic expression.”
Users are capable of uploading copyrighted material on the service. Google empowers the content owners to complain but Viacom claims that the company needs to do more by preventing any uploads of copyrighted material on the service.
“Google has now declared in a document to the courts that the lawsuit is a direct threat to freedom on the internet.”
Google said YouTube was firm to the requirements of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, saying the federal law was intended to protect companies like YouTube as long as they responded properly to content owners’ claims of infringement.
Viacom on their part claims: “On the contrary, the accessibility on the YouTube site of a huge library of the copyrighted works of plaintiffs and others is the cornerstone of defendants’ business plan.”
The two sides have intensified the war of words lately. Earlier this month they exchanged barbs as Sumner Redstone singled out YouTube during a speech on piracy, and Google lawyers said they were ready to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court.