Viacom International, Inc. v. YouTube, Inc., 676 F.3d 19 (2nd Cir., 2012), was a United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decision regarding liability for copyright infringement committed by the users of an online video hosting platform.

Google responded that the safe harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act shielded the company from liability for the infringing behavior of its users.

[7] Viacom did not seek damages for any actions after Google put its Content ID filtering system in place in early 2008, and instead pursued declaratory relief on the ability of American copyright law in addressing Internet-enabled infringement.

[2] During the pre-trial discovery phase, Viacom requested and received a court order for YouTube to hand over data detailing the viewing selections of every user who had ever watched videos on the site.

[11] Judge Louis Stanton dismissed the privacy concerns as "speculative", and ordered YouTube to hand over documents totaling about 12 terabytes of data.

"[8] Stanton also noted that YouTube had successfully enacted a mass take-down notice issued by Viacom in 2007, indicating that this was a viable process for addressing infringement claims.

And finally, Stanton rejected Viacom's comparisons between YouTube and other Internet-based, media-sharing companies, such as Grokster, that had previously been found guilty of contributory copyright infringement.

[19] Thus, the case was again eligible for a jury trial at the district court level, in which YouTube would have to defend itself against the copyright infringement claims.

"[3] Viacom initiated another appeal to the circuit court level, but they and Google announced in 2014 that they had reached an out-of-court settlement.