Search giant Google, parent of YouTube, yesterday answered Viacom’s lawsuit, which contends that YouTube is infringing on the copyrights of Viacom-owned content. (News.com has posted the entire answer here in PDF form.) The interesting part is not Google’s response but it’s choice of legal strategy.
As expected, Google basically denied all of Viacom’s allegations, saying that it hasn’t infringed on the rights of the entertainment company and that the DMCA’s safe harbor provisions protect it from liability. In an interesting rhetorical twist, Google is also trying to elevate this dispute to a fight over the future of the Internet itself. In the opening paragraphs of its filing, the company says
By seeking to make carriers and hosting providers liable for internet communications, Viacom’s complaint threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment, and political and artistic expression.
Other than that, Google’s response is literally an “answer” to Viacom’s complaint, a point-by-point, paragraph-by-paragraph, admit-or-deny retort to the allegations raised in Viacom’s original complaint, yielding no deep insight into the detailed arguments and evidence that Google might produce at trial (and Google has asked for a jury trial in lieu of a decision by a judge.)
Google’s attorneys, the very high-powered law firms of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott, could have attempted to kick up a lot of dust and cause some amount of pain and cost to Viacom by not merely “answering” the lawsuit. They could have, for example, filed a motion to dismiss some or all parts of the lawsuit, which would have triggered an intensive round of legal filings and preliminary court decisions, delaying the prospect of an actual trial for an additional year, at least. As it stands now, a trial in this case won’t take place for years.
Moreover, with a motion to dismiss, Google stood a chance of dispensing with major parts of the lawsuit or even the entire complaint, although the chances of knocking out the entire suit were small — judges tend to let complainants have their day in court.
Still, if Google thought it might lose to Viacom, a motion to dismiss would have bought some time while the Mountain View giant weighed options. A motion to dismiss (usually accompanied by a request for summary judgment at the outset) would have also forced Viacom to spend millions more than it would otherwise have spent in legal fees, softening up the media conglomerate for settlement negotiations.
But Google chose the fastest option by directly answering the complaint. In essence, Google is saying to Viacom: bring it on. Not only will this strategic choice produce the quickest legal resolution, it has the added benefit of dampening the fireworks surrounding this litigation, and these days the last thing Google wants is a big legal spectacle. Michael Kwun, managing counsel for litigation at Google is quoted as saying at a press briefing “We’re not going to let this lawsuit distract us.”
Cynthia Brumfield at 8:29 AM|Comments(0)
Blogs We Read
