YouTube beats off $1bn Viacom copyright case once AGAIN The courts have once more sided with YouTube in the copyright case brought against it by Viacom and others. The billion-dollar lawsuit was first filed way back in 2007, not long after Google snapped up the video streaming service. Viacom alleged that YouTube was knowingly allowing copyright-infringing material to be posted …
I swear...reading articles like this is like watching Survivor. First you have an alliance, and then ones in the alliance turn on the other ones when it suits their best interests while still pretending to hold up appearances.
And we consider that to be trash television! Why is it any different in the corporate world??
I don't pretend to completely understand myself, but it sounds like the lower court initially dismissed lawsuit completely, then the appeals court said they have to consider it fully, which they did, only to reach the same conclusion. And now Viacom is appealing the ruling instead of the dismissal. I don't know if there's a theoretical maximum number of times a case can be sent back down and appealed again, but they've definitely got at least one more appeal coming since it hasn't hit the supreme court yet.
They can appeal as many times as they want all the way to the Supreme Court. The next issue is if they are granted another trial. When they appealed the first time, the court viewed that there was enough evidence of why it wasn't a fair trial. Now that the court has ruled the same yet again, most likely the reasons they used for the appeal the first time have been satisfied, so they will need to show other reasons. The appeals court can reject their request for an appeal.
"...DMCA), which protects any company from copyright-infringement liability if it's just the medium used to post the content..."
Cool! So a company which doesn't even host the content but merely allows you to download a link to it must be even more protected than that. I'm sure the bans on sites like Pirate Bay and Megaupload are being lifted, even as we speak!
Looks like Viacom's lawyers hit the jackpot with this case.
This suggest that it might make business sense for lawyers to plan to lose, if they know the person paying their bills has enough political capital invested to appeal.
AFAIK, in the UK, unlike the US, plaintiffs are generally liable for both sides' costs incurred after any sufficient offer has been made by the respondent, even if the plaintiffs win. This makes for less legal harassment, which this is starting to resemble.
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commenting that if YouTube is protected by safe-harbour then so are Pirate Bay or Megaupload, are forgetting one important detail: You Tube is owned by a large multinational corporation with billions of dollars to chuck at lawyers, while Pirate Bay and Megaupload were set up by little guys with fuck all. You lot are aware that there's one law for corporations and their upper echelons and another for us little people, and that justice is only a commodity for sale to the highest bidder, right?
Much as I dislike the legal attacks against TPB etc, YouTube does have substantial non-infringing uses whereas TPB doesn't. The reality is that YouTube was set up for people to share their videos. Many people but not most post infringing content. TPB, on the other hand, exists solely to facilitate piracy and has almost no non-infringing use.
I still don't think that TPB, which is really no more than a search engine, shouldn't be allowed to carry on fairly much unfettered, there is a clear distinction between the way YouTube and TPB operate.
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