socialrosiechen: Google beats Viacom in YouTube court case, BitTorrent users win

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Google beats Viacom in YouTube court case, BitTorrent users win

The torrent community is thrilled with the outcome of the recent Viacom v. Google lawsuit, where Viacom sued the Big G for letting YouTube users upload its copyrighted material. Google won the billion-dollar case, but TorrentFreak says BitTorrent users are the real winners.

The ruling essentially says that if copyright holders want content removed for violating the DMCA, they must ask to have it removed. That means Google doesn't have to pre-emptively screen everything that goes up on YouTube, and it may also mean that torrent sites don't have to check their links for torrents of copyrighted material before allowing the links to be posted. That's TorrentFreak's interpretation, of course, not a judge's, but it's still very interesting.

TF goes on to point out that most torrent sites have ways for copyright holders to communicate and request a takedown of a link to their copyrighted material. Maybe they'll have to do that, now, before they sue to get a torrent site taken offline.