• Slate, Friday, June 25, 2010 10:19 AM

Not that long ago, Slate's Farhad Manjoo was criticizing YouTube's founders for what he calls "their apparent disregard for copyright law during the site's first few years of operation." But, now that a federal judge has thrown out Viacom's copyright infringement suit against YouTube, Manjoo is admitting he was wrong.

The judge ruled that YouTube had complied with the "safe harbor" provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act -- the statute that governs how Web companies must manage copyright claims. "This is where I was off the mark," Manjoo admits. "So what if YouTube knew some videos might be illegal? A mere 'general awareness' of infringing content doesn't constitute a violation of the law, the judge ruled. Instead, what matters is what YouTube's founders did each time they were given notice of a specific infringing video." What did they do? They took the video down. "And as long as they did that, they were acting within the law."

Read the whole story at Slate »