YouTube Fends Off Viacom

YouTube/Google has successfully defended itself against Viacom’s lawsuit, meaning that “the court has decided that YouTube is protected by the safe harbor of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) against claims of copyright infringement.” As the EFF explains: “YouTube and all other ‘user-generated content’ sites rely on these safe harbors to shield themselves from copyright infringement liability”; in other words, you can’t hold a company that hosts user-generated content responsible for everything its users do, or they couldn’t function. This is already the law, but as we noted previously, it takes a behemoth the size of Google to defend it.