YouTube exec: Viacom lawsuit would severely harm company; Viacom once tried to buy YouTube

A YouTube executive on Thursday stressed the video site would "cease to exist in [its] current form if Viacom and others have their way in their lawsuits."

On the same day a judge unsealed documents from that copyright infringement case, filed in 2007, Chief Counsel Zahavah Levine wrote on the company's blog that Viacom itself was responsible for the many videos illegally uploaded to YouTube.

Levine pointed to a series of court documents that show top Viacom executives using the video sharing site to promote their own shows, only to later demand that YouTube take the videos down.

YouTube said it honored those countless requests, as federal law specifies. But Levine added the company was unable to take down every video because YouTube could not "have known which Viacom content was and was not authorized to be on the site."

"But Viacom thinks YouTube should somehow have figured it out," Levine continued. "The legal rule that Viacom seeks would require YouTube -- and every Web platform -- to investigate and police all content users upload, and would subject those web sites to crushing liability if they get it wrong."

Levine thus repeated YouTube's argument that the court uphold the "safe haven" provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which protects third parties from copyright infringement claims, provided they take the illegal content down when asked.

But separately, Viacom-YouTube court documents released Thursday reveal a previously unknown fact: Viacom "repeatedly" tried to buy YouTube, according to Levine.

Court papers show Viacom made the first move before October 2006, when Google purchased YouTube for about $1.6 billion. Consequently, Levine said it made little sense that Viacom once hoped to partner with a video venture it has recently likened to "Napster or Grokster" -- two file-sharing websites federal judges have hammered for copyright infringement.

But Viacom executives have since pointed to a series of e-mails, also released Thursday, that show YouTube executives once looked the other way on most of the company's copyright claims.

However, Levine stressed those e-mails had been taken out of context, adding that Viacom continued uploading videos, even as it began to launch copyright complaints.

Consequently, YouTube promised Thursday to continue fighting the lawsuit aggressively in court.

"We look forward to defending YouTube, and upholding the balance that Congress struck in the DMCA to protect the rights of copyright holders, the progress of technological innovation, and the public interest in free expression," Levine said.

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