YouTube partly liable for copyright infringement, Austrian court states in preliminary ruling

YouTube could be partly liable for copyright breaches by videos uploaded by users, the Vienna Commercial Court has found.

It is only a preliminary ruling but it could be a game-changer for the way the massive platform operates, and for its tenuous relationship with the global music industry,

YouTube maintains it is a neutral technical platform that is not legally responsible for content uploaded by third parties.

The court was ruling in a lawsuit brought against YouTube in 2014 by Puls 4 commercial television station, over the unauthorised availability of its footage on the platform.

The court found that because of YouTube’s “links, mechanisms for sorting and filtering, in particular the generation of lists of particular categories, its analysis of users’ browsing habits and its tailor-made suggestions of content… YouTube is no longer playing the role of a neutral intermediary”.

It added, “YouTube must in future — through advance controls — ensure that no content that infringes copyright is uploaded.”

Puls 4’s managing director Markus Breitenecker said, “With this decision we have reached a milestone for the efforts of rights owners worldwide to recapture their content and the possibilities of exploiting it economically.

“The media, who call themselves social networks, will have to realise that they have to take responsibility for the content from which they earn millions. This is a real gamechanger.”

The court’s decision is not legally binding yet. But if it is upheld on appeal, the likes of YouTube and Facebook would have to drastically change their business model.

YouTube intends to carefully scrutinise the court’s judgement before it lodges an appeal.

Meantime in Germany, the Federal Court of Justice is deciding YouTube’s extent of liability in a case that producer Frank Peterson brought alleging that tracks he produced on an album by British soprano Sarah Brightman appeared on the site.

In America, Universal Music Group and Stephanie Lenz the mother who posted a video of her toddler son dancing to Prince’s ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ have announced they have come to an agreement.

Prince apparently was not impressed with the video, and Universal Music demanded that YouTube take it down.

Lenz, with help from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, filed a lawsuit in 2007 alleging Universal had violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by knowingly misrepresenting its copyright claim and not factored in “fair use”.