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A recent decision regarding the video-sharing site Veoh may have some fairly reaching impact for the web as a whole. It has been decided that Veoh is not responsible of searching through and filtering every single video submitted to their site, with the courts claiming it wasn't feasible to do such. Further, they found that Veoh isn't necessarily responsible for the hosted content, and that the DMCA act does not apply in this case.

The obvious parallel to this is YouTube, which Google is defending in the courts on numerous fronts for nearly the exact same purposes. Viacom has been hunting YouTube down, using some of the very same arguments that the group suing Veoh did.

To Viacom's credit, they did approach Google prior to heading to the court. Io Group, who sued Veoh, did not – they simply took them to court without ever notifying them of any infringement. Still, this could potentially set the tone for the rest of the Google/Viacom case.