The legal fight is about who bears the burden of stopping copyright infringement online. In 2007, media titan Viacom International Inc. sued YouTube Inc., then recently acquired by Google Inc. Viacom argued that among the millions of short video clips uploaded by users to YouTube were some that violated Viacom’s copyrights, and that YouTube didn’t do enough to police the site to prevent this.
YouTube insisted that it did exactly what the law — the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) — required: When notified of an infringing clip, it promptly removed it. That’s the essential bargain Congress crafted in passing the DMCA — copyright owners have the responsibility of identifying and reporting copyright infringement, and Internet services have a duty to remove content quickly when notified.
