But Viacom wasn’t the first company to sue YouTube. There’s also a much smaller lawsuit involving Robert Tur, a LA news reporter who sued for copyright infringement. NBC Universal and Viacom just recently asked the US District Court in LA that they be allowed to file a friends-of-the court brief. The thought is that this case will be tried before the Viacom case and could set precedent for how the Viacom case plays out in court.

Next, the Premier League (the UK soccer league) sued YouTube for copyright infringement, apparently claiming that YouTube encourages copyright infringement and doesn’t pay copyright owners. They also have a class action suit site up for anyone else who feels YouTube violated their copyright and wants to get in on the settlement (if there is one).

Finally, Thailand is also taking YouTube to court because they hosted a video that many Thais felt insulted their king. At the heart of the case is whether Google lied about not being able to stop the video clip last month that ridiculed Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

At least Google has the cash to fight back. In the copyright infringement cases, it’s likely that Google’s response will be similar to the Viacom one. I’m not entirely sure how it will respond to the Thailand claim which wants YouTube to censor inappropriate content.

If I understand the complaint, Thailand has blocked the site since April 4 because YouTube didn’t take the clip down. According to this BBC article, eventually YouTube did cave to censorship and removed the clip. While I’m not sure exactly what the clip was about but a search on YouTube shows a number of derogatory videos still up about the Thai King. Are they looking to have YouTube ban each one? Will they provide a list of “inappropriate content” and hope Google caters to their demands? I guess we’ll see…

1) Watchdog group, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), got involved and started requesting that anyone whose materials were unfairly removed because of the blanket search were to contact them as they started building a case.

2) Fox demanded that Google turn over user data on anyone that uploaded unaired episodes of 24 - and Google complied.

3) Copyright lawyer, Wendy Seltzer of ChillingEffects.org, uploaded a snippet from the Super Bowl which stated that all rights, accounts and descriptions of the game were owned by the NFL onto YouTube in an experiment to see if YouTube would remove it. They did within 5 days but after protests that the video was clearly “fair use”, reinstated her video last week.

4) Yesterday, Viacom filed a lawsuit against YouTube in New York for $1 billion in damages - quite steep given that Google paid about $1.7 billion for YouTube last year - because “almost 160,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom’s programming have been available on YouTube and that these clips had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.” It is also requesting an injunction that will prohibit Google and YouTube from other copyright infringement.

It will be interesting to see how this one plays out in court. I wouldn’t be surprised if other lawsuits will follow but Google does have a huge chunk of change - $11 billion in cash - to fund their legal defense. It’s going to be difficult for any media company to stop YouTube, which serves over 100 million video streams a day, but that doesn’t mean that lawyers won’t try.

As I mentioned previously, most lawyers seem to agree that YouTube is protected by copyright law as long as it responds to the copyright owners’ requests to remove their content. A side question seems to be whether it’s ok to run advertising beside the videos.

[YouTube] entered uncharged territory when it recently began adding ads next to search results. The law prohibits a site from benefiting financially from infringement, but the company argues that it’s protected since it doesn’t sell ads against the individual videos. Still, the courts haven’t set clear boundaries. “There has to be some way to make money with advertising that doesn’t deprive you of the safe harbor. But where that line is, no one really knows,” says Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Amateur video creators also seem to have a love/loathe relationship with the site. Some have been turning to sites that share ad revenues with them - like Revver - rather than uploading to YouTube to make money off their efforts.

Still, with 65,000 video clips uploaded and 100 million watched daily, YouTube has become the online media center for the web. BusinessWeek reports that it accounts for 60% of all videos watched online, which makes it a prime candidate to promote videos legitimately as well as a huge target for infringement. NBC and E! have been working with YouTube to promote specific clips, but NBC also has set up communication with the site to remove copyrighted clips more quickly.

Tur, who apparently has a reputation as “an active litigant”, is asking for $150,000 for each infringement (it was viewed 1000 times) - or $150 million in damages! He decided to sue YouTube rather than the person that upload because

“idiosyncratic choice of descriptive terms to describe the content of the video - tags - making it extremely impractical to identify plaintiff’s copyrighted works.”

Apparently, Tur didn’t even bother to send a “cease and desist” letter informing of YouTube of the copyrighted content and giving them the opportunity to remove it. YouTube has been known to cooperate in the past to letters including the popular Saturday Night Live Lazy Sunday video that went viral back in Jan 2006.

Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation blog thinks that YouTube will probably win this case based on Section 512(c) fo the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Rule No. 1 is the implementation of a “notice and takedown” system to respond to infringement notices from copyright owners. YouTube, of course, has this in place and takes down material once properly notified by an owner that a clip is infringing.

So that makes one more lawsuit challenging the DMCA.