[nuxi7]

Actually the interesting thing is that a good chunk of the ruling is citing multiple existing precedents stating that youtube is not guilty of contributory infringment.

So it seems the precedents are there, but only the big guys like Google can stand up and get them recognized in court.

[_delirium]

The cost of litigating a case like this is pretty unfortunate. Some of the more on-point precedents were recently set by Veoh (cited on pp. 24-27 of the YouTube decision), who won their case and then went bankrupt almost immediately afterwards: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/02/veoh-files-for-bankru...

[nuxi7]

Ah, even if you win, you lose.

After I made my previous post I was pondering what Viacom hops to win in this case. The obvious thought is that they want to gut the DMCA safe harbor, but this seems like it would make combating piracy harder in the long run.

The safe harbor is the carrot offered so that service providers respond to DMCA takedown notices. Without that carrot, or with it much farther away, service providers are less likely to cooperate with Viacom.

Viacom is setting the playing field for service providers like this: 1. Dedicate resources to DMCA takedowns and then spend millions defending your safe harbor status anyway, or 2. Spend millions in copyright fines

This is a bad playing field to set, the DMCA takedown is a pretty sweet deal for Viacom. Why spoil it by making option 2 so attractive to service providers? And then option 3 dawned on me:

3. Don't allow user content

I don't think this case is really about copyright at all. It seems to me that Viacom's real goal is just to squash a competitor using the courts.