Ilan Barzilay Quoted in NewsFactor Online
"YouTube-Viacom Ruling Is a Victory for Web Providers"

Ilan Barzilay was quoted in the June 24, 2010 NewsFactor Online article, “YouTube-Viacom Ruling Is a Victory for Web Providers.” The article also ran on Yahoo! News and CIO Today. The article discussed a recent court ruling involving YouTube, which found that the online service is protected by the safe-harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) against claims of copyright infringement.

According to the article, the ruling is a victory for Google, YouTube’s parent company, in its long-standing $1 billion copyright-infringement battle with Viacom. The court decided that YouTube is in line with the established judicial consensus that online services are protected when they work cooperatively with copyright holders to help manage their rights online. Ilan explained that the safe harbor provision of the DMCA turned out to be the silver bullet for YouTube. He added that although many cases come down to he said, she said, the facts of the Viacom-Google case set the stage for a straight legal decision: Either YouTube falls under the provisions of the statute or it doesn't. The article noted that Viacom plans to appeal the decision.

Ilan commented that “when this gets kicked up to the second circuit, the appeals court will have to decide whether the district court's interpretation is right and whether, based on the undisputed facts of what YouTube does and doesn't do, the site is entitled to the legal protection. From there, no doubt, it will go to the Supreme Court. Whether the Supreme Court takes it is another question. But this is a straight issue of law and it's going to go all the way up.”

The article noted that the implications of the ruling are significant. Ilan commented that the ruling should cause other Web site providers to breathe a sigh of relief. If providers have to police content, they wouldn't be able to function. Ilan concluded: “You just wouldn't have services like this YouTube available if the sites were responsible for policing the content because they would spend all of their time worrying about getting sued for copyright infringement. This is a big victory for YouTube.”