Keeping the power of the Internet alive, U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton has finally upheld YouTube’s rights to distribute free online movies and TV show clips in a land mark judgment, while dismissing Viacom’s claim of a whopping $1 billion for copyright infringements. As per the ruling, YouTube has been given a clean chit when it comes to user uploaded content from Viacom’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, without the express approval of the network.

Viacom had taken Google’s YouTube to court on counts of copyright infringement and was seeking damages worth $1 billion. In its complaints, the entertainment behemoth had argued that, YouTube was allowing the publishing of copyrighted material on its sight, to serve the millions of users that access YouTube on a daily basis and that the online video giant did not pay any license fee to Viacom for showing these clips to users for free. In the ruling, Judge Stanton stated that, as per the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, there exists a provision in the law, that enables the websites to run user generated content without having to go through each and every one them.

In the month of February, 2007, Viacom had contacted YouTube in regards to some 100,000 copyright infringements in video clips that were running on YouTube, to which the company responded by removing all such videos.

Via USA Today