Viacom International Inc. v. YouTube, Inc.
| Viacom International, Inc. v. YouTube, Inc. | |
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| United States District Court for the Southern District of New York | |
| Full case name | Viacom International Inc. v. YouTube, Inc. |
| Date decided | June 23, 2010 |
| Citations | No. 07 Civ. 2103, 2010 WL 2532404 (S.D.N.Y 2010) |
| Judge sitting | Louis L. Stanton |
| Case holding | |
| Google's motion for summary judgement was granted on the grounds that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's "safe harbor" provisions shielded Google from Viacom’s copyright infringement claims, but was later overturned in part, and the case remains pending. | |
| Keywords | |
| Copyright, Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Safe Harbor | |
Viacom International, Inc. v. YouTube, Inc., No. 07 Civ. 2103, is a U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York case in which Viacom sued YouTube, a video-sharing site owned by Google, alleging that YouTube had engaged in "brazen" and "massive" copyright infringement by allowing users to upload and view hundreds of thousands of videos owned by Viacom without permission. A motion for summary judgment seeking dismissal was filed by Google and was granted in 2010 on the grounds that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's "safe harbor" provisions shielded Google from Viacom’s copyright infringement claims. In 2012, on appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, it was overturned in part. On April 18, 2013, District Judge Stanton again granted summary judgment in favor of defendant YouTube. An appeal was begun, but the parties settled in March 2014.
On March 13, 2007, Viacom filed a US $1 billion lawsuit against Google and YouTube alleging that the site had engaged in "brazen" copyright infringement by allowing users to upload and view copyrighted material owned by Viacom. The complaint stated that over 150,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom's programming, such as SpongeBob SquarePants and The Daily Show, had been made available on YouTube, and that these clips had collectively been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.
Viacom claimed that YouTube had infringed on its copyrights by performing, displaying, and reproducing Viacom's copyrighted works. Furthermore, the complaint contended that the defendants "engage in, promote and induce" the infringement, and that they had deliberately built up a library of infringing works in order to increase the site's traffic (and advertising revenue). In total, Viacom claimed three counts of direct infringement, and three counts of indirect infringement, specifically inducement, contributory infringement and vicarious infringement.
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