The Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris decides in favor of Google in copyright suit
On May 29th the Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris (“the Tribunal” hereinafter) dismissed a copyright lawsuit lodged by the French TV channel TF1 against Youtube (owned by Google). In the suit, the TV station sought €141 million in damages for hosting a huge amount of copyright-protected videos uploaded by users without authorisation.
In the ruling (text in French), the Tribunal also analyses the validity of certain clauses included in YouTube´s general terms through which users grant the internet intermediary certain rights on the uploaded content – reproduction, public communication and transformation among others- on a non exclusive basis.
Regarding the copyright alleged infringement, the Tribunal considers that YouTube as a mere host is not responsible a priori for the content of the material it hosts; therefore, it is not required to implement on its own motion any preventive measure to guarantee that only content not infringing third party rights can be uploaded into its system.
YouTube, the ruling claims, could only be held responsible in the terms provided by on the previous paragraph, when the videos at hand included blatantly illegal material. In order to provide with some certainty in this point, the Tribunal says which are those cases by means of a closed list: pedophilia, crimes against humanity and content inciting racial behavior.
Only in these three cases the Tribunal considers that YouTube has an obligation to act on its own initiative and remove the content from its servers. For all the remainder of the hosted content, including therefore that infringing copyright, YouTube will only be liable when it has effective knowledge of its illicit nature and do not proceed to the corresponding removal.
In this context, the Tribunal understands that copyright holders have the duty to cooperate with YouTube in order to first identify the potentially infringing videos and secondly to report that content so that it can be effectively removed.
Finally the Tribunal acknowledges the existence of the Content ID service provided by YouTube in order to ease – through a comparison between the uploaded content and that included in a database- the identification of any potentially infringing material.
The ruling follows the reasoning given by the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit of the United States in “Viacom vs Google”, a case already analyzed in our website. While both rulings might set a precedent for further ISP-liability situations, they contradict to a certain extent another decision taken by a Court in Hamburg last April 20th (see a analysis in IPKat) in which YouTube was considered as indirectly liable for the copyrighted content posted by its users and was expressly asked to provide for more efficient filtering tools. Unfortunately the lack of uniformity in this field, increases the legal uncertainty of ISP trying to make business at a worldwide scale.
Related Posts:
- US Case Law: “Viacom vs. Google”
- The European Court of Justice confirms that internet streaming is an act of public communication
- CJEU Judgment of 8 September 2016, C-160/15, “GS Media”: New Guidelines to Determine the Existence of an Act of Communication to the Public
- “Rapidshare” and the future of file-hosting