As it defends itself against allegations of copyright infringement made by at least three separate copyright owners, Google's YouTube won some minor legal victories on Tuesday, legal documents show.
No, the decisions had nothing to do with the main event, which is the suit filed in March 2007 against YouTube by Viacom, parent company of MTV and Paramount Pictures. But Google's attorneys did manage to convince a federal judge to dismiss statutory damages asked for by a European soccer league.
United States District Judge Louis Stanton, of the Southern District of New York, also threw out punitive damages, saying that the videos, from the Premiere Football League, were foreign works and weren't covered by United States copyright law.
Stanton wrote that the Copyright Act "bars statutory damages for all foreign and domestic works not timely registered."
The soccer league is part of a class action group that includes, The National Music Publishers Association and Bob Tur, the videographer who filed many well known clips of the Los Angeles riots and the O.J. Simpson police chase in the early 1990s. He was the first person to sue YouTube for copyright infringement.
How the judge's decision will affect the rest of the plaintiffs is unclear. The work by Tur and the NMPA, both based in the United States, are presumably covered by United States copyright law.
Lawyers from the New York firm Proskauer Rose, which represents the class, did not immediately respond to an interview request.
Viacom's suit, which is separate from the class action, continues to plow ahead.
This article was first published as a blog post on CNET News.
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