“We are not going to let this lawsuit distract us,” Michael Kwun, managing counsel for litigation at Google, told reporters.
In its response to the lawsuit, filed Monday in Federal District Court in Manhattan, Google said that Viacom’s claims were unfounded and asked for a judgment dismissing the complaint.
In March, Viacom, the parent company of MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, sued Google and YouTube, the video sharing site it acquired last year, saying they were deliberately building a business on a library of copyrighted video clips without permission. Earlier this year, Viacom had asked YouTube to take down 100,000 clips that it said infringed on its copyrights.
Google’s court filing gives few new details of its legal thinking, which relies heavily on the so-called “safe harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, enacted in 1998. Those provisions generally hold that Web sites’ owners are not liable for copyright material uploaded by others to their site as long as they promptly remove the material when asked to do so by the copyright owner….
[Via NY Times]