14 DAY TRIAL // YouTube has won a case against Viacom, after the Judge reinforced the ruling of three years ago. The media conglomerate says it will appeal the decision.
Viacom convinced the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to make Judge Louis Stanton review the ruling he gave back in 2010. However, contrary to what Viacom hoped, the decision remained unchanged.
The entire saga started back in 2007 when Viacom sent around 100,000 takedown notices to YouTube. Of the lot, only a few dozen videos were removed for copyright infringement.
Soon afterwards, Viacom filed a legal claim against Google and YouTube, asking $1 billion (€763.5 million) in damages.
Finally, in June 2010, the court ruled in Google’s favor, saying the company was protected by provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
“Today is an important day for the Internet. For the second time, a federal court correctly rejected Viacom’s lawsuit against YouTube. This is a win not just for YouTube, but for the billions of people worldwide who depend on the web to freely exchange ideas and information,” Kent Walker, Senior VP and General Counsel at Google, says in a post on YouTube’s blog.
Viacom, however, isn’t giving up and intends to appeal the decision.
“This ruling ignores the opinions of the higher courts and completely disregards the rights of creative artists. We continue to believe that a jury should weigh the facts of this case and the overwhelming evidence that YouTube willfully infringed on our rights,” the company says, as quoted by AllThingsD.
Viacom Inc. is an American global mass media company that deals with cinema and cable television, among other interests.
Starting with 2010, Viacom became the fourth largest media conglomerate in the world, competing with The Walt Disney Company, Time Warner and News Corporation.
It operates over 150 networks in 160 countries, with hundreds of millions of subscribers.