NBC and Viacom are backing Los Angeles newsman Robert Tur, who filed suit against YouTube in July for letting users post his video of trucker Reginald Denny being beaten during riots in Los Angeles in 1992.

"We are confident in our legal case, and more importantly in the tremendous benefit of giving creators a place to post and discuss their videos, whether it be an individual's family video or the BBC's decision to partner with us to host their content," YouTube's owner Google said on Monday in response to an AFP inquiry.

"We meet and exceed our responsibilities under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which balances an easy takedown process and provides complete safe harbor for hosts such as YouTube."

The Viacom-NBC alliance, revealed in a US district court filing in California on Friday came as YouTube was hit with a class-action copyright violation suit filed by English football's Premier League in New York State.

The league's suit was filed on behalf of copyright owners "whose works were reproduced, distributed, publicly displayed, performed or otherwise transmitted or disseminated on youtube.com without authorization," according to court paperwork.

In March, US media giant Viacom launched a billion-dollar (736 million euro) lawsuit against YouTube, accusing it of illegally showing clips from its television shows.

However, the jointly crafted brief filed in the Tur case marked the first time NBC took copyright concerns about YouTube to court.

NBC and YouTube have a "strategic partnership" launched in June of last year and depict themselves as partners in efforts to devise ways for YouTube to protect copyrights of film and television show owners.

NBC and Viacom are out to back Tur's position in a potentially precedent-setting court case in which a "little guy" is up against Internet giant Google's vast financial and legal resources. FULL STORY

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One of the best quotes, in part of the article not posted here:

"YouTube incorrectly contends that the DMCA permits it to avoid any responsibility for the content on its commercial website and completely shift the burden to content owners to discover and notify it of infringements," Frackman wrote in the brief.

"In the meantime, the presence of the infringing content draws users to the YouTube website, and in turn generates revenue for YouTube," he added.

"Regardless of the precise scope intended by Congress in enacting the DMCA, it certainly did not intend that the statute be used to escape liability for the commercial activities of the nature engaged in by YouTube."

I LOVE THIS! I would be so happy if the onus was on the publisher of the content, not the copyright holder. All of these torrents stealing content, etc. would be so much easier to get your content off or put them out of business.

Your thoughts? Is this gonna be as big as I think it is?