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Are YouTube Users at Risk in Viacom Suit?
Intellectual Property |
2007/03/19 09:26
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| It's the headline that many saw coming before the dust even settled on Google's $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube last year. Legal experts might not have predicted the name of the behemoth that would file a formal complaint against the viral-video site, but a massive copyright infringement suit seemed inevitable to many. That behemoth, of course, is Viacom. Viacom took its gloves off in a digital-age boxing match that could go many more than 12 rounds as two technology champions duke it out on principle. In a statement it released in conjunction with filing its $1 billion federal copyright lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Viacom called YouTube a "significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others' creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google." Whether those "fans" to which Viacom referred mind Google making money from the traffic they drive to the video-sharing site is not the issue. Whether the fans are liable in future copyright suits is. According to some legal experts, YouTube's uploading community could find itself in the line of fire. |
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Class action or a representative action is a form of lawsuit in which a large group of people collectively bring a claim to court and/or in which a class of defendants is being sued. This form of collective lawsuit originated in the United States and is still predominantly a U.S. phenomenon, at least the U.S. variant of it. In the United States federal courts, class actions are governed by Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule. Since 1938, many states have adopted rules similar to the FRCP. However, some states like California have civil procedure systems which deviate significantly from the federal rules; the California Codes provide for four separate types of class actions. As a result, there are two separate treatises devoted solely to the complex topic of California class actions. Some states, such as Virginia, do not provide for any class actions, while others, such as New York, limit the types of claims that may be brought as class actions. They can construct your law firm a brand new website, lawyer website templates and help you redesign your existing law firm site to secure your place in the internet. |
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