*A battle ground between Youtube and Viacom.
Source: http://www.google.com.my
In the previous case about the court incident of 2 giants, Viacom and Youtube; it has brought up the issue of copyright regulations online. Viacom claimed that the company should be responsible for the material uploaded to Youtube which infringed upon Viacom’s copyright. In additional to that, Viacom also claims that Youtube has violated copyright laws by helping distribute illegally copied videos that were uploaded to the sites by individual users. However, Viacom has lost its $1 billion lawsuit against Google because Google was protected under 'safe harbour' as laid out in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). (Jobling, 2005) The argument from Google holds because YouTube gives provision for copyright holders to have infringing content removed from its service it isn't engaging in any actionable copyright infringement itself whereas Viacom argues that YouTube should be held accountable for what users upload to the site because Google and YouTube staff had knowledge that copyright infringing content was present on the site.
Copyright law and technology influences each other in a dialectic relationship. (Montagnani, 2009) Law helps in shaping the technology by influencing the emergence of certain new technologies whereas technology is now challenging the laws. For now, there are many sites are actually illegally providing copyrighted materials such as mp3, movies, or even applications. After the incident of Google and Viacom, this actually shows that there’s even a larger issue at stake which is the legal tide may be turning against many of the most popular companies on the web.
Copyright law has constantly struggled to keep pace with advancements in the technologies. They must constantly try to meet the legal needs created by every new technological development. (VerSteeg, 2007) This is really important to be fair to the original author or company to protect their productions. As we all know, there’s no free lunch in this world. Every hard work of the author should be acknowledged or else it could be considered as a crime of stealing.
References
1. Jobling H. 2010, Viacom Looses $1 Billion Copyright Lawsuit Against YouTube, online, retrieved on 13 November 2010, from http://www.trustedreviews.com/software/news/2010/06/25/Viacom-Loses--1-Billion-Copyright-Lawsuit-Against-YouTube/p1
2. Montagnani M.L. 2009, A New Interface Between Copyright Law and Technology, Cardozo Arts and Entertainment, vol. 26, no. 719, pp. 719 - 713, retrieved on 13 November 2010, from http://www.cardozoaelj.net/issues/09/Montagnani.pdf
3. VerSteeg R. 2007, Viacom V. Youtube: Preliminary Observations, Journal of Law and Technology, vol. 1, no. 9, pp. 43 – 68, retrieved on 13 November 2010, from http://jolt.unc.edu/sites/default/files/43-68_versteeg_v9i1.pdf
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