It’s the video millennium. Every modern mobile phone is a video camera and a video player. Video displays are everywhere, from taxicabs to endcaps. Webcams perch like pigeons on every major tourist destination in the world. So it’s no surprise that video sharing has become an industry, and that legal controversy has followed. The Southern District of New York recently announced its much-anticipated decision in Viacom International Inc. v. YouTube Inc., 2010 WL 2532404 (S.D.N.Y. June 23, 2010), granting summary judgment in favor of YouTube. The decision breaks no new ground, but it continues a trend: Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), owners of copyrights to videos will have the burden of policing the Internet.
Although the litigation leading to the decision went on for years, the district court identified a single, determinative issue: Is a general awareness of infringing activity on an online site or service enough to raise a “red flag,” and hence deprive a service provider of the protection of the DMCA safe harbor from liability for “infringement of copyright by reason of the storage at the direction of a user,” or is knowledge of specific infringements of individual items required?
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