14 DAY TRIAL // One of the biggest lawsuits concerning Google at the moment is starting to move forward after almost three years. The Viacom versus YouTube suit has been in the preparation phase, but is now set to get into the ruling process as both sides have made requests for a summary judgment by the court. This is the first step in getting the lawsuit underway and it may even be the last as the judge has the possibility to rule on the case at this stage without going to full trial.
At the heart of the dispute are Viacom's accusations that YouTube and by extension Google were well aware of copyrighted material being available on the video site and did nothing to remove it, preferring to profit from the content. The media giant filed a suit against YouTube shortly after it had been acquired by Google in 2007 for $1.6 billion, one of its biggest acquisitions to date. Google on the other hand claims that it had no knowledge of infringing material on the site and acted to remove it when it was acting under the provision of the DMCA safeguards.
Those were pretty much the arguments the two companies made in their filings with the court. Viacom claims that Google acted knowing fully well that the material was infringing and preferred to look the other way meaning that the DMCA doesn't apply. It may claim a lot of other things but, as All Things Digital points out, much of Viacom's filing was blacked out by the judge leaving us to wonder what else it might say.
Google's filing follows the same path, it stands by its initial claims that it does its best to keep out copyrighted material and that, at the time, it had no knowledge of any such material on YouTube. Now that the two parties have filed their claims the lawsuit can move on to the summary judgment. If the judge finds enough evidence to make a decision he or she can rule at this stage. More likely though, this will be the final stage before the lawsuit goes to trial but, in any case, there may be some sort of conclusion by the end of the year.