Another Viacom-suit naysayer,
Business 2.0's Owen Thomas Magazine, says there's one thing missing from most coverage of the $1 billion lawsuit against Google and YouTube: the law. YouTube hosts
a bunch of copyrighted material--but Google employees didn't put it there, the Web site's users did. Whether Viacom's legal team likes it or not, stolen content that comes from users is treated
differently.
See the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1996. Web site operators aren't responsible for content uploaded by their users, they have only to take it down when a
copyright owner requests it. Just because YouTube keeps promising and not delivering on a copyright filtering service, doesn't mean the site is beholden to providing one under the law. It isn't.
In fact, Thomas bets Google's lawyers have advised its client not to provide the service it's been promising in order to bait big media into such a lawsuit. You would think that because
the search technology king could develop a content filtering system, in which case it make sense if the company, believing it has a stronger legal position, were waiting for the suit. He implies that
Viacom better win, because if it doesn't, big media is left with a much weaker negotiating position with the tech giant.
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