Louis Stanton, a district court judge, said that YouTube cannot be held responsible for individuals who post videos from popular productions, including Viacom, without getting approval from YouTube itself.

Viacom’s argument was that YouTube makes it “easy” for users to post video clips and difficult for copyright owners to monitor those clips that get posted without approval.  Judge Stanton simply rejected this argument based on the fact that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act eliminates the responsibility for websites of having to check user-generated content before it gets posted on the site.

YouTube has a reputation of removing clips that in violation of copyright laws immediately after they are posted, a fact confirmed by the judge.  Two years ago, YouTube actually removed 100,000 videos that violated Viacom copyright laws.

Viacom agreed to appeal the ruling in that it goes against the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as well as the views of Congress and the Supreme Court.  According to the ruling, individuals post 24 hours’ worth of video every minute to YouTube.  For Google, this ruling was an important win considering the number of people who turn to the Internet for information, content and communication.