Viacom is suing YouTube in the US District Court for the
Southern District of New York for copyright infringement. It claims
that YouTube has violated copyright laws by hosting videos owned by
it at its popular site.
Viacom has asked for punitive damages from YouTube, which is
unusual since only actual or statutory damages are awarded under
the copyright legislation it is using to sue YouTube.
The media company had cited an old case ruled on by the judge in
the present case, Judge Louis Stanton, in which Stanton said that
punitive damages might be permissible.
Judge Stanton has now said that those damages cannot be awarded
in copyright cases. "If it ever was, that decision is no longer
good law," said Judge Stanton in his current ruling, referring to
his previous one. "Recent decisions have rejected its holding."
Judge Stanton had previously ruled in a case involving
photographer Andrea Blanch and the artist Jeff Koons in which
Blanch claimed that a work by Koons infringed her rights in one of
her photos.
The particular circumstances of that case meant that Blanch
could not claim actual or statutory damages, meaning that she would
receive no compensation for infringement. This was why Stanton
tried to allow punitive damages to be awarded.
"Although recognizing that 'Conventional authority holds that
punitive damages are unavailable in copyright infringement
actions', I gave Blanch the opportunity to argue, on the facts,
that such an apparently anomalous result was not required by the
law, and granted Blanch 'leave to amend the complaint so that
plaintiff has a chance to prove malice and raise squarely the
question whether punitive damages are available to her'," said
Stanton.
Stanton admitted that the "leading treatise on copyright law"
recently described the decision on which he had based his earlier
ruling as a "rogue case" and said that it would be particularly
inappropriate in this instance since Viacom have the other kinds of
damages open to them, he said.
"Common-law punitive damages cannot be recovered under the
Copyright Act," he said.
Viacom's suit seeks more than $1 billion in damages over the use
of material from its channels, such as MTV, Comedy Central and
Nickleodeon.
