미국에서의 유튜브 소송의 경과와 시사점

Jun. 23. 2010, U.S. S.D.N.Y court has granted that the YouTube is protected by the ‘safe harbor’ provision in Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It started on Mar. 2007 as Viacom filed a $1 billion copyright lawsuit against YouTube and Google Inc. This judgement reaffirmed that service provider do not required to monitor or affirmatively seek copyright infringing material. In addition, the burden of policing, identifying the potentially infringing material is on the owners of the copyright. The ‘Knowledge’ in § 512 (c) indicate specific, identifiable knowledge and the ‘Red flag’ is also applicable to obviously pirate site. Service providers are protected, as long as they delete infringing material instantly when they receive a take-down notice. Recently, our court also set precedents relating to service providers’ responsibility. Now there are high probability that US court decision applied in korea through Korea-US FTA. YouTube provides the best matched service to the idea of web 2.0-creation, participation, re-creation- and it make YouTube can be grown up to the world biggest video sharing site just within 5 years from the foundation. Because of this symbolism, this judgement will affect to service providers, users and copyright owners of the world, even though it’s just the first trial. It’s time to prepare introduce a new Copyright Act exceeding the values of possession and monopoly in the long term.