What is theft?
A landmark ruling in the case brought against Google-owned YouTube by US media giant Viacom has been ruled in Google's favour by a US judge. This also applies to the parallel case brought by The Premier League. You can read the full ruling here.
District Judge Louis L Stanton ruled that YouTube is protected by the ‘safe harbour' provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which essentially means that ISPs, aggregators and social networking services can't be held responsible for copyright infringement as long as they take reasonable steps to address the issue once it's flagged-up by the copyright holder.
In a blog post, Google VP and general Counsel Kent Walker said: "This is an important victory not just for us, but also for the billions of people around the world who use the web to communicate and share experiences with each other," and it's hard not to agree.
While, of course, the creators of content have to be protected from theft, the nature of the Internet-centric world we now live in is that people are sharing stuff with each other all the time. The music industry has finally embraced this and, via services like Spotify, is trying to use this tendency to find new ways of selling its products.
Funnily enough, Viacom doesn't quite see things in the same way. "We are disappointed with the judge's ruling, but confident we will win on appeal," said Michael Fricklas, Viacom's EVP and general counsel.
"Copyright protection is essential to the survival of creative industries. It is and should be illegal for companies to build their businesses with creative material they have stolen from others. Without this protection, investment in the development of art and entertainment would be discouraged, and the many artists and producers who devote their lives to creating it would be hurt. Copyright protection is also critical to the web- because consumers love professional content and because legitimate websites shouldn't have to compete with pirates."
He went on to say that, while Google has put piracy-limiting tools in place now, before it was acquired by Google, YouTube "stole hundreds of thousands of video clips." This is fair point too; by the time Google acquired YouTube it was already the dominant video-sharing website. If this dominance was achieved by illegally taking content, then it's right that the content owners should be compensated.
"This case has always been about whether intentional theft of copyrighted works is permitted under existing law and we always knew that the critical underlying issue would need to be addressed by courts at the appellate levels," concluded Fricklas. "Today's decision accelerates our opportunity to do so."
