Before Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit against against YouTube comes close to a courtroom, law professors Doug Lichtman (University of Chicago) and Lawrence Lessig (Stanford) have taken their arguments to the op-ed pages of the LAT and NYT, respectively:
In his LAT’s op-ed, Lichtman, who is part of Viacom’s legal team, lays out his view of the case in pretty basic terms: not only has YouTube has been a haven for unlicensed content from the very beginning and not only does Google know this, it exploited continues to develop ways for users to violate copyright protections. Additionally, Lichtman provides a preview of what arguments in the case will look like. The case is expected to center on interpretations of 1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Lessig argues that the statute says “a provider (like YouTube) need not monitor its service or affirmatively seek facts indicating infringing activity. That burden, instead, rests on the copyright owner. In exchange, the law gives the copyright owner the benefit of an expedited procedure to identify and remove infringing material from a website.”

Lichtman contends those issues are trumped by the Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in favor of movie studios against Grokster, which found that companies that actively encourage infringement are ultimately responsible for their customer’s illegal activity: “The question of exactly which precautions the law should demand of Grokster and related services was a difficult one. The question of whether Grokster’s ill-motivated founders should be allowed to play any role in establishing those rules, by contrast, turned out to be embarrassingly straightforward.”
Related:
—Viacom and YouTube’s Dance Around: History Through Links
—Viacom Sues Google-YouTube: Wants More Than $1 Billion In Damages, Injunction
—Our Coverage: Grokster vs MGM, Brand X Case