Chances are they stand a better chance of winning against the little guy than against Viacom. And if they do, in the Viacom case they may be able to site precedent set in their smaller case against Robert Tur. If Mr. Tur loses, it could become difficult for Viacom to win.

Perhaps a daft question - what is the difference between Youtube users posting copyright infringing material and the users of P2P doing the same thing? I know the scale is different, but shouldn't Google be treated with the same hostility as the P2P hosts? Shouldn't Google be forced to hand over the IP addresses of anyone who has posetd copyright infringing material to the legal authorities?

Google should be treated as toughly as P2P otherwise it will demonstarte what we all suspect - that it one law for rich, another law for the rest of us.

Should double team YouTube, WWF stylee.

Or, more sensibly, Viacom should back Mr Tur financially in order to help him win, thereby setting the precedent in their favour.

Fighting Tur is going to be cheaper than fighting Viacom. He doesn't have Viacom's deep pockets.

But Tur does bring up an interesting point.

Does Google/YouTube have a way to limit or block infringing content?

The answer is maybe.

Sure they can tag a file when its uploaded, such that any attempts to reload the same clip will cause it to be rejected. And they can ban a person from uploading content if they are found to be uploading copyright infringing material.

Yet, they can't stop someone from taking a "clean" copy and uploading it, or manually removing their "digital watermark".

The point is that they could have made a reasonable effort to try and stop abuses. Even if its not 100% effective, it would have shown that they were trying to comply with the law, rather than ignore it.

IMHO Tur and Viacom's cases do have merit.

From time to time, magazines and newspapers publish infringing articles. It happens, despite the research they perform. What do they do? They publish retractions. Can't take the material down once it's printed. At least You Tube can (and apparently does) do that. Magazines and newspapers have ads all over the place. They're profiting from the publication of this infringing material. If You Tube/Google wants to win, they need to use this argument.

Dillion,

You're mixing two different analogies and issues. Your argument holds no water.

A newspaper can only print a retraction.

Google needs to remove the material within the guidence of the DCMA.

Two totally seperate things that have nothing in common.

Its not an open and shut case, but it does not look good for google.