Technology History | 500 Pearl Street — The Billion-Dollar Test of the Safe Harbor

The complaint filed at this address on 13 March 2007 ran to a number that sounded like a valuation rather than a damages claim: more than US$1 billion.

Viacom International sued YouTube and Google in the Southern District of New York, docket 1:07-cv-02103, four months after Google closed its purchase.

The company counted nearly 160,000 unauthorised clips of its programming on the site, from The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, South Park and its cable networks, and said they had been watched more than 1.5 billion times.

It had already sent over 100,000 takedown notices, which YouTube had honoured. The argument was that honouring them one at a time was not enough.

What the case actually tested was a nine-year-old statute. Section 512(c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act shields a service that hosts what its users upload, provided it removes infringing material once notified.

If Viacom won, every host would have had to inspect everything in advance, and the participatory web would have become a licensing business overnight.

Judge Louis Stanton, on this court since 1985 and taking senior status in 1996, granted summary judgment to YouTube on 23 June 2010. The safe harbor held.

The Second Circuit vacated part of that in April 2012, finding a jury could conclude YouTube had known about specific infringing videos rather than infringement in general. Stanton reached the same result again on remand in April 2013.

On 18 March 2014 the two sides settled. Terms were never disclosed, and people close to the deal said no money changed hands.

Seven years of litigation, and the statute came out roughly where it went in.

One order along the way outlived the case. In July 2008 the court directed Google to hand Viacom its entire logging database, every record of every video viewed, which turned a copyright fight into a privacy argument and taught the industry what discovery could reach.

The building is the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse at 500 Pearl Street, the working Manhattan home of the Southern District of New York.

The photograph is its Pearl Street entrance, grey granite and gold lettering, with the street number set in small plaques either side of the doors.

Photo: Ken Lund from Reno, Nevada, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons