Faster Forward: Judge junks Viacom's YouTube suit by Rob Pegoraro at WaPo:

Google won an immense legal victory when a federal judge dismissed a $1 billion lawsuit filed by Viacom against its YouTube video-sharing site.

U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York granted YouTube's request for summary judgment Wednesday afternoon--that is, declaring Viacom's arguments too weak to deserve further examination.

As copyright litigation goes, this is a Big Deal. Stanton held that YouTube complied with the relevant provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that require Internet services to remove infringing copies of copyrighted content when asked by copyright holders, but which don't require online firms to look for copyright violations themselves.

These "notice and takedown" provisions boil down to the principle that Internet providers and Web hosts aren't cops and shouldn't have to act like them.

I blog this because this is going around as Big Win For Google Over Viacom or somesuch abstraction of what happened.

Pegoraro's lead above tells you what it means: The burden is on the copyright holder to request removal of its proprietary content from YouTube and other hosts of user-contributed material. "You should make them stop uploading it" was nixed. The judge noted that Google-owned YouTube had no way of knowing which of thousands of Viacom videos were uploaded with permission and which without.

This is common sense. No Web site has the staff to vet every bit of "consumer-generated media" in advance. But when notified of a violation, you do have to take the file down.

The sheer impossibility of moderating on that scale may protect us from other assaults on one of the earliest principles of the dial-up Internet: that hosts are "common carriers," like the phone company itself, not liable for the activities of those using their services.

Related: NYT (Judge Sides With Google in Viacom Video Suit) has more details of the case.