Google and YouTube don’t usually comment on lawsuits; instead, we’re left to look over various court documents. These are still helpful, however, and they’ve recently provided an update on the case between YouTube and the Football Association Premier League. To sum up: YouTube pleaded innocent.
Of course, there was a little more to it than that. YouTube “denied infringing copyrights of England’s Football Association Premier League Ltd. and said any lapses resulted from innocent error,” reports Bloomberg’s Susan Decker. “They also said they are protected under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which makes Internet services immune to infringement claims if they take steps to prevent illegal postings.”
Decker then relayed a quote from YouTube’s formal defense that speaks of “extraordinary libraries of information . . . created by users who have every right to share it.”
If you’ve read many court documents, you’ll know that that’s a surprisingly well-turned phrase – no dense legalese here. So even as Google develops its own “video identification technology,” YouTube’s lawyers may be trying to keep people on their side. That’s not a bad thing, though – what normal user wants clips removed from the video-sharing site? – and Google has often taken a role as a sort of public defender.
(This is something of a side note, but while we’re on the subject of public opinion, a site featuring a screaming, red-and-white painted soccer fan is fully behind YouTube. CORRECTION: See comment below.)
Anyway, in response to the invocation of the DMCA, Louis M. Solomon, a soccer league lawyer, told Decker, “We are eager to litigate that question to conclusion, because I think the law is completely to the contrary. . . . There’s nothing wrong with the statute. What’s wrong in our view is how YouTube has distorted the statute to its own unlawful end.”
