Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Google Angry with Viacom's Lawsuit


The story so far: Viacom, the owner of MTV and Comedy Central, sent a subpoena to the search giant, demanding to remove more than 100.000 clips from YouTube. The main reason?
Viacom considered that Google receives praises and money for the content provided by other publishers. Of course Google agreed and started the huge removal. After only one week, Viacom went even further and filed a complaint against Google, suing the company for copyright infringement. Since the lawsuit was officially confirmed, the battle was continued by other elements concerning the two companies. For example, the YouTube users wanted to sue Viacom because some of their clips were removed in the huge deletion process started at the MTV owner's request.

Today, a new important step is made by Google that decided to release a public response to comment on the lawsuits and the facts that caused the trouble. “By seeking to make carriers and hosting providers liable for internet communications, Viacom's complaint threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment, and political and artistic expression. Google and YouTube respect the importance of intellectual property rights, and not only comply with their safe harbor obligations under the DMCA, but go well above and beyond what the law requires,” the search giant started the response.

As you can see, Google aims to bring the online carriers and the users on its side, sustaining that Viacom's requests fight against all of them by trying to restrict the ways they use the Internet.

“Defendants admit that YouTube encourages users to upload video clips to the service that the users have the right to upload, and that clips uploaded to the service are typically available for viewing free of charge by members of the public who have internet access,” the search giant continued.

At this time, the case is quite weird as both companies are trying to accuse one another for infringing the rights. First, it was Viacom that sustained YouTube infringed the copyright and published videos without its authorization. Now, the Google product tries to accuse the MTV owner for infringing users' right with the intention of restricting some of the Internet functions.


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