A court filing has been made at the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in New York. It had been expected after Viacom’s initial $1bn suit against Google, which owns YouTube, was rejected in June.
Viacom has a whole section of its corporate website devoted to the subject of its legal action against YouTube. It says that over 62,000 videos on YouTube infringe Viacom’s copyright and that these have been viewed more than 500 million times.
It also argues that far from trying to protect copyright owners, YouTube fears that traffic would drop dramatically if it were all removed.
While fans of YouTube were relieved by the June decision, among copyright owners there was disappointment at the ruling.
It effectively puts the onus on them to find instances of illegally copyrighted material and then set about getting them taken down. Film director Taylor Hackford, who is president of the Directors Guild of America, described this as a "never-ending task of Sisyphean proportions" for copyright owners.
One tactic that Viacom might use in its appeal is referring to the case of Grokster, a file-sharing site that was closed in 2005 after film studio MGM sued it for copyright infringement.
The question over whether technology makers are liable for copyright infringement has been debated since Sony launched its Betamax video player and was subsequently sued by film studios.
In that case, a judge found that the makers of the technology were not liable for copyright infringement.
In the case of YouTube, the judge found that because the company notified users that they must take down illegal materials, it was protected under the "safe harbour" element of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
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