• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, November 4, 2013

Human Rights Watch, Consumer Action and the Consumer Electronics Association are among the roster of outside groups asking the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals to rule in YouTube's favor in its long-running copyright battle with Viacom.

The organizations say that U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton in New York rightly threw out Viacom's lawsuit, which sought to hold Google's YouTube accountable for infringement by users. Stanton cleared Google on the ground that it was entitled to rely on the protections in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That law says service providers are immune from liability if they take down infringing clips in response to complaints by copyright owners.

Viacom has asked the 2nd Circuit to reinstate its lawsuit, which dates to 2007. The company contends that Stanton gave short shrift to evidence showing that YouTube was “willfully blind” to infringement. Specifically, Viacom points to a March 2006 report prepared by YouTube founder Jawed Karim, which said that clips of "well-known shows," including "Family Guy," "South Park," and "MTV Cribs," were present on the site.

This summer, movie studios, major record labels and unions representing actors and directors filed papers siding with Viacom in the feud.

For its part, Google says in papers filed late last month that Viacom was never able to establish that YouTube knew the URLs of  specific infringing clips, yet refused to remove them.

Late last week, a host of outside groups weighed in with their own friend-of-the-court briefs. Human Rights Watch (along with Consumer Action and other advocacy organizations) contend that an anti-Google ruling could have a sweeping affect on worldwide activism. “The number of videos currently on YouTube relating to human rights issues is breathtaking,” the groups argue. “The subject matter of these videos spans issues of justice and equity that are affecting people in every corner of the world.”

The organizations say that requiring companies like Google to proactively police their services for copyright infringement would harm “not only open Internet video platforms like YouTube, but also ... millions of human rights activists and consumers who benefit from their availability, ease of use, and breadth and speed of transmission that these platforms provide.”

The Consumer Electronics Association, which filed a separate friend-of-the-court brief, frames Viacom's lawsuit as part of a long-running pattern in which content creators challenge new technology. “Throughout history, the content industries have feared new technologies and repeatedly tried to use copyright law as a barricade to their progress. However, history teaches that the technology at issue in this case, like other technologies that the content industries have feared, can create lucrative new economic markets,” the CEA says.

The group points out that more than 100 years ago, John Philips Sousa unsuccessfully urged Congress to ban the gramophone and player piano.  “The phonograph and piano rolls didn’t destroy music, as Sousa predicted,” the CEA writes. “Over time, new formats of the mechanical music Sousa despised were especially profitable: the recording industry resold the same music multiple times as mechanical formats evolved from 78 RPM records, to LPs, 45’s, eight-track tapes, audiocassettes, and CDs.”