YouTube and Viacom Meet in Court Again, as Appeal Gets Underway

YouTube and Viacom are headed back to the courts. Google and the media company have been held up in a legal battle over copyright infringement on YouTube, for many years now.

Last year, Google won a rather clear victory with the court siding with YouTube and absolving it of any responsibility over what its users upload.

But the decision was not to last, Viacom filed for appeal and this new stage of the lawsuit is set to begin later today with oral hearings in which the two sides will present their case.

It's unclear whether Viacom has a chance of another outcome this time around, but the history around cases like this doesn't suggest that it will.

In all cases that went to court in the US, the websites won and the judges underlined that, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, this type of websites are protected from copyright infringement charges stemming from what their users do on the sites.

The biggest such case to determine liability, has been the Viacom versus Google one and certainly the most publicized.

So far, Google has had it rather well, the judge argued that YouTube took steps to remove infringing content from the site when asked by rights owners and even to prevent such content from landing on the site.

The fact that YouTube's execs were aware that there was copyright infringing content on the site, even in overwhelming numbers, was not enough for them to be responsible or to be forced to take any measures other than the takedown mechanism described by the DMCA, the court decided.

Similar cases like the Universal Music Group versus Veoh and EMI versus MP3Tunes had the same outcome.

Changes are stacked up against Viacom then, but don't discount a surprise ruling yet, things like this have been known to happen when it comes to copyright issues.