This morning, YouTube appears to be a touch closer to losing a lawsuit and owing Viacom $1 billion dollars. A report indicates that some new evidence has surfaced in a 31-month-old case, and the evidence supposedly shows that YouTube employees didn’t quite do their best to keep copyrighted content off the site.
Greg Sandoval wrote, “YouTube e-mails indicate that YouTube managers knew and discussed the existence of unauthorized content on the site with employees but chose not to remove the material, three sources with knowledge of the case told CNET.” Which would be bad for YouTube’s plead-ignorance defense.
Then there’s something that, if true, would be much worse. Sandoval also wrote, “Lawyers working on a $1 billion copyright lawsuit filed by Viacom against Google’s YouTube may have uncovered evidence that employees of the video site were among those who uploaded unauthorized content to YouTube.”
Now, it’s important to remember that YouTube’s cleaned up its act in recent times (see Content ID articles), so a defeat here shouldn’t result in a shutdown of the site. Also, Google’s current market cap is $156.91 billion, so it can pretty well afford a payout.
Still, no corporation wants to forfeit $1 billion, and if Viacom wins its suit against YouTube, other companies’ lawyers are liable to smell the blood/cash in the water.
This long-stalled lawsuit will bear watching in the weeks ahead.
