Judge Sides With Google in Viacom Suit Over Videos - NYTimes.com

Perhaps not over yet

But Viacom, the owner of Comedy Central, MTV and Nickelodeon, said it would appeal the ruling, which it said was fundamentally flawed.

“Copyright protection is essential to the survival of creative industry,” Michael Fricklas, Viacom’s general counsel, wrote in a blog post. Mr. Fricklas said that before YouTube put in place a filtering mechanism to more easily detect copyright infringement, the company had built itself on pirated material and sold itself to Google for $1.65 billion.

“YouTube and Google stole hundreds of thousands of video clips from artists and content creators, including Viacom, building a substantial business that was sold for billions of dollars,” Mr. Fricklas said. Legal experts said that the ruling blessed YouTube’s practices for dealing with copyrighted material, as well as those of many other sites that handle user-generated content in a similar fashion.

Judge Sides With Google in Viacom Suit Over Videos - NYTimes.com