Judge sides with YouTube on several copyright issues
As it defends itself against allegations of copyright infringement made by multiple copyright owners, Google's YouTube won some minor legal victories on Tuesday, legal documents show.
No, the decisions had nothing to do with the main event, which is the suit filed in March 2007 against YouTube by Viacom, parent company of MTV and Paramount Pictures. But Google's attorneys did manage to convince a federal judge to dismiss a number of the claims for statutory damages asked for by group of copyright holders that included a European soccer league and music publishers.
U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton, of the Southern District of New York, also threw out punitive damages, saying that the videos, from the Premiere Football League, were foreign works and weren't covered by U.S. copyright law.
Stanton wrote that the Copyright Act "bars statutory damages for all foreign and domestic works not timely registered."
The soccer league is part of a class action group that includes, The National Music Publishers Association and Bob Tur, the videographer who filmed many well known clips of the Los Angeles riots and the O.J. Simpson police chase in the early 1990s. He was the first person to sue YouTube for copyright infringement.
How the judge's decision will affect the rest of the plaintiffs is unclear. The work by Tur and the NMPA, both based in the United States, are presumably covered by U.S. copyright law.
Lawyers from the New York firm Proskauer Rose, which represents the class, did not immediately respond to an interview request.
Viacom has cooperated with the class-action group and even combined some parts of their case but the entertainment conglomerate is not a member of the class and was not named in the judge's order.
Greg Sandoval covers media and digital entertainment for CNET News. He is a former reporter for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. E-mail Greg, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sandoCNET. 
I hope they will nail youtube too and shut it down..
Why? Just out of spite?
Even though google.inc has a lot (a lot) of copyrighted material on their servers (illegal).
If they try to fight against stealing of copyrighted material then they need to take care of everybody.
lawyer: youtube got out of everything we did nothing wrong in that respect
judge: u guys are pirates piratebay....
I have problems with Judge Stanton's interpretation. What ever happened to the Berne Convention? This includes works of other foreign nations who, along with the U.S. signed on this agreement. Like any work made within the U.S., you do not need to apply for copyright protection. A Japanese TV show taken from Japan, and then uploaded to YouTube enjoys the exact same protections as an American TV show.
In this case, You Tube would be banned from displaying those videos in the original country but could still show them in the US because those companies didn't register in the US?
I also find it funny when US courts apply US laws to every country in the world, as if the all world is their domain, and then the oposite doesn't apply!
so japanese tele enjoys the same illegal monopoly over the (supposedly publicly owned) u.s. airwaves as the drivel made by the u.s. media companies?
ps. i like the word choice 'enjoys'. these programmes enjoy being banned by the u.s. media interests.
1) Setup a site called YouTubex in a country other than the US.
2) Make copyrighted material available to all the world.
3) Count my money.
4) When someone comes a suing, tell them that they have not copyrighted the work in that country.
I thought copyrights were global? What about WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation) and WTO (World Trade Organisation)?
Isn't this is exactly the type of role that the UN organisations should be filling.
Unfortunately, this is a double standard that the rest of the world has seen before many times - one rule for the US, and another for everyone else - at ICC, WTO, Geneva conventions, etc.
This type of behaviour gives fuel to the rhetoric of the anti-US sentiment.
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