Establishing intent
While YouTube was an independent startup, it was generally assumed that one of the reasons it hadn't been sued into oblivion for copyright violation was that it had so few assets, it wouldn't be worth the effort.
That all changed when Google acquired it for $1.65 billion in 2006. Now YouTube was owned by a company with very deep pockets indeed. Let the litigation begin.
Google attempted to minimise the legal grief it knew it was letting itself in for by taking down a lot of content that people would otherwise have had to pay to access, but six months after the acquisition Viacom accused YouTube of "massive intentional copyright infringement" and went to court looking for a cool billion dollars in damages.
Three years down the track and we finally get a look at the opening briefs in the lawsuit, which reveal that our own Premier League is also suing YouTube. Google has published its defence documents in which it argues that, as an online service provider, it can't be held responsible for what is uploaded onto YouTube.
In a blog post YouTube chief counsel Zahavah Levine went on to say that most content is inherently copyrighted, so YouTube is being asked to second-guess the will of content providers, many of whom willingly upload their stuff onto the site.
Intriguingly, Levine goes on to allege that Viacom deliberately, but surreptitiously, uploaded content onto YouTube for years. "It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site," said Levine. "It deliberately ‘roughed up' the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses."
