Viacom-YouTube Lawsuit Reveals YT Founders' Incriminating Emails

by Jacob Zinn | March 18, 2010 at 04:10 pm

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A series of emails between YouTube’s co-founders are a smoking gun in a $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit between Viacom and YouTube’s parent company, Google.

Court documents allege that YouTube co-founders Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim knew that copyrighted material was being uploaded to the site and didn’t remove it at the risk of losing at least 80% of its viewers. Viacom said it has evidence that YouTube was turning a profit from 62,637 Viacom-owned clips viewed more than 507 million times and that the founders knew of the legal consequences.

YouTube Emails a Smoking Gun in Viacom Lawsuit

The emails show that Chen didn’t mind leaving copyrighted videos on their site, but knew it looked bad when Karim uploaded protected material.

“We’re going to have a tough time defending the fact that we’re not liable for the copyrighted material on the site because we didn’t put it up, when one of the co-founders is blatantly stealing content from other sites and trying to get everyone to see it,” wrote Chen in a July 19, 2005 email to Hurley and Karim.

At the time of the start-up, Chen didn’t think legal action would be severe and that the company was protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DCMA, however, only protects providers from illegally uploaded user-generated content and requires them to immediately remove infringing content once alerted to it.

Other emails revealed that employees were entirely aware of this content and even edited the flagging tool to keep from learning of more illegally uploaded videos. YouTube did comply with DCMA removal requests, but Chen felt there was no need to take down copyrighted videos unless they received a cease-and-desist letter.

In March 2006, Karim sent a memo to YouTube’s Board of Directors suggesting that removing content that obviously didn’t belong to them—such as episodes of South Park, Family Guy and MTV Cribs—would prevent criticism over copyright infringement, even though they are not required to monitor content.

Google Buys YouTube and Inherits Viacom Suit

In November 2006, Google bought YouTube for $1.76 billion and has therefore inherited the lawsuit with Viacom. Viacom claims Google was fully aware of YouTube’s copyright infringement at the time of purchase.

Google said Viacom tried purchasing YouTube in July 2006, a few months before Google bought out the company, and only launched the lawsuit against YouTube when it couldn’t strike a partnership deal with the company.

Google also said that Viacom had added its own content to the site and included it as some of the illegally uploaded content in their lawsuit. Viacom denied the claim and maintains the number of illegal videos is much greater than authorized videos.