Austria: YouTube in the dock over users’ copyright breaches

A court in Austria has ruled that internet giant YouTube can be held liable for copyright breaches in videos its users upload.

In a judgment published last week, Vienna’s commercial court said YouTube had played an active role in the dissemination of such content and as such could not claim “neutral intermediary” status.

Plaintiff Puls 4, a television station, brought the case against the video streaming site in 2014 over unauthorised content appearing in videos.

Its lawyers said they had determined YouTube’s complicity in spreading content through “painstaking” analysis of how the site operates.

The court stated that as a consequence of the site’s “links, mechanisms for sorting and filtering, in particular the generation of lists of particular categories, its analysis of users’ browsing habits and its tailor-made suggestions of content… YouTube is no longer playing the role of a neutral intermediary”.

“YouTube must in future – through advance controls – ensure that no content that infringes copyright is uploaded,” it stated.

The company told Austrian media it took copyright protection “very seriously” and that it would study the judgment carefully but did not rule out the possibility of appealing.