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Forbes is reporting that Google has finally filed a response to Viacom’s copyright infringement lawsuit against Youtube. Google is obviously arguing that they are operating within legal limits:

Google said that YouTube respects the importance of copyrights and goes above and beyond what is required under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which gives Web hosts protection from copyright lawsuits so long as they comply with requests to remove unauthorized material.

YouTube says its cooperates with holders of copyrights and immediately complies with requests to have unauthorized material removed from the site.

The copyright law has a Safe Harbor provision which places responsibility on both the copyright holder and services like Youtube. Copyright holders are responsible for guarding their copyrights and should ask services like Youtube to rectify any violations of their copyright. As long as a service operates swiftly to protect the copyright, they are protected by the law. To their defense Google will be claiming that they moved swiftly to bring down all the copy-righted videos mentioned by Viacom and would be quoting their swift action on a false notice by a 15 year old Australian as an example.

The problem however is that as soon as the copyrighted videos are taken down, they get uploaded once again by some Tom and Joe, which leaves Viacom doing the same pointless exercise again and again.