YouTube has won another copyright infringement victory: a U.S. District Court has denied class-action status to copyright owners looking to sue Google over the use of unauthorized material on the video-sharing service. U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton in Manhattan denied the motion on the basis that each individual case would have unique claims that would need to be weighed separately.

"The suggestion that a class action of these dimensions can be managed with judicial resourcefulness is flattering, but unrealistic," Stanton wrote in the ruling. He added, "Generally speaking, copyright claims are poor candidates for class-action treatment.”

It should be noted, however, that the ruling does not affect the merits of any of the individual cases of copyright infringement.

 This case was first opened in 2007 with various named plaintiffs including the English Premier League, the French Tennis Federation, the National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA) and individual music publishers (NMPA settled with YouTube (News - Alert) in 2011). By granting class status, the case would become a "mammoth proceeding," Stanton said, because the class could swell to include any copyright owner whose unauthorized videos failed to be adequately blocked by YouTube or whose music was used on YouTube without permission.

The ruling follows another pro-YouTube decision in the case of the $1 billion lawsuit filed in 2007 by Viacom (News - Alert) over copyright infringement. Clips from the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, South Park and SpongeBob SquarePants were inadequately blocked by the service, Viacom alleged. But one year after the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reopened the suit, Stanton rejected Viacom's claim that YouTube willfully turned a blind eye to its users uploading copyrighted content. The court upheld a 2010 decision in the case that found YouTube to be protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which aims to balance the public interest in free expression with the rights of copyright holders.

YouTube has always maintained that it removes any pirated content from the site as it becomes aware of it, which satisfies the DMCA requirements. It also argued that imposing more stringent content filtering measures to prevent pirated material from appearing on the site would hamper a free exchange of ideas and expression.

The class action case is Football Association Premier League Ltd et al v. YouTube Inc et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 07-03582.