• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, July 8, 2009

A federal judge has handed YouTube a partial victory in a copyright infringement lawsuit.

The ruling concerned the UK soccer organization Premiere League and a group of 11 other copyright owners who are suing YouTube for copyright infringement. The copyright owners, who are seeking class-action status, allege that their clips were uploaded to YouTube without their permission. (For now, that lawsuit is proceeding side-by-side with Viacom's copyright infringement case against YouTube.)

YouTube moved for an order before trial, stating that any foreign copyright owners who had not registered their work in the U.S. were not eligible to get statutory damages -- which range from $750 to $150,000 per infringement -- for those works.

If owners are not entitled to statutory damages, they can still get actual damages, but must first prove how the copyright infringement affected their revenue.

U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton mostly sided with Google and ruled this week that the copyright owners of foreign, non-registered works were not eligible for statutory damages. But Stanton said there's one exception: owners of foreign clips of live broadcasts can still get statutory damages, although the broadcasts were not registered.

The copyright owners' attorney, Hal Shaftel, a partner at Proskauer Rose, said that portion of the ruling was a "significant victory" for some of his clients, adding that now they won't have to prove how the alleged infringement has affected them financially.

In another pro-Google portion of the ruling, Stanton said that none of the copyright owners are entitled to punitive damages. Google said in a statement that it was pleased with Stanton's decision. "The plaintiff's damages claims, like the lawsuit itself, are baseless," the company stated.

Meanwhile, there has been no ruling yet addressing the central issue in the case -- whether the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's safe harbor provisions protect YouTube from liability. The safe harbor provisions state that Web sites are not liable for copyright infringement committed by users, provided that the sites remove clips upon request. But that act has some exceptions, including for sites that have profited by copyrighted content.