Viacom lawyer: YouTube knows it violates copyrights
update WASHINGTON—There's no doubt that YouTube is committing copyright infringement, so the central question is who must police its content, an attorney for Viacom said Friday. — After "months and months" of negotiations about that dilemma …
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands two days after Viacom's $1B-plus lawsuit against Google over YouTube clips — a suit that followed 'months and months' of failed negotiations over who polices copyrighted uploads, ending with Viacom ordering more than 100,000 clips, including The Daily Show, pulled from the site. The attorney's Friday framing is deliberate: concede no doubt that infringement is occurring, and move the argument to policing responsibility, where YouTube's DMCA safe-harbor position is most vulnerable.
The same day, Valleywag flagged what it called Viacom's own video pirates, complicating the moral high ground. Meanwhile YouTube has been hedging in parallel — pursuing deals with major content providers since the Google acquisition closed and announcing, via CEO Chad Hurley in January, a move toward revenue-sharing with creators.
First-order effects
- Google/YouTube inherits a legal fight whose terms have been narrowed by Viacom's counsel: not whether infringement exists, but whether YouTube — not rights holders — must find and remove it, putting the DMCA safe-harbor reading itself at issue.
Second-order effects
- Every other major content owner now watches this case to calibrate its own play against YouTube: sue like Viacom or cut licensing deals like the ones YouTube has been striking since the Google acquisition, with NBC's posture toward the platform already under scrutiny in coverage of its anti-YouTube positioning.
Third-order effects
- If courts accept Viacom's premise that knowing infringement shifts policing duty onto the platform, user-generated video sites will need proactive filtering and licensing infrastructure rather than reactive takedowns — raising the capital cost of operating a UGC platform and pushing consolidation toward companies that can afford both litigation and licensing.
The trend: Litigation is forcing user-generated video platforms to internalize the cost of policing copyrighted content, converting takedown-by-notice into filtering and licensing as the industry norm.