Viacom’s Google suit may actually go to trial, though I think everybody is just blowing smoke right now with Viacom looking for a nice payoff and Google looking to minimize the payoff to keep within the 400 million they allocated in the YouTube sale to copyright infringement payoffs.

Unless Google is lucky enough to get a silicon valley jury with an average age of 25 it seems to me they’d handily lose a lawsuit.   The notion that Google (let alone everybody with a PC and internet connection), didn’t realize YouTube contained vast amounts of copyrighted material and that Google didn’t have the technical capabilities to screen for copyrights is absurd.    I presume they’d make the fairly technical case that they can’t be held responsible for users uploading stuff, only for taking it down when they get complaints, but I think this (reasonable in the future) notion will wear thin under the weight of current (old fashioned) copyright rules.