In the prolonged legal battle between YouTube and Viacom, the free video-sharing website has emerged victorious after fighting for more than three years.

In March 2007, Viacom filed a $1 billion infringement lawsuit against Google over YouTube, which was acquired by Google for $1.6 billion in 2006. The suit alleged that YouTube was guilty of willful and widespread infringement of Viacom’s copyrighted content, citing more than 100,000 takedown orders against the site in the previous month. YouTube was accused of allowing around 160,000 unauthorized Viacom program clips to be posted and viewed.

The case has now been rejected by a US judge, saying that YouTube has done everything to remove the copyrighted clips. Judge Louis L. Stanton, the district court judge for the Southern District of New York, took his judgement based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which protects internet services from accusations of copyright infringements as long as they immediately remove the content in question.

Kent Walker, Vice President and General Counsel of Google, said, “This is an important victory not just for us, but also for the billions of people around the world who use the web to communicate and share experiences with each other.”

Not surprisingly, the decision has miffed Viacom, which owns top channels like MTV, VH1 and Dreamworks, and they have released a statement calling it “fundamentally flawed”. They have even declared of plans to appeal to the US Court of Appeal for the Second Circuit.

“After years of delay, this decision gives us the opportunity to have the Appellate Court address these critical issues on an accelerated basis. We look forward to the next stage of the process,” reads the statement by Viacom.

Michael Fricklas, Viacom’s General Counsel, has been quoted as saying, “Copyright protection is essential to the survival of creative industries. It is and should be illegal for companies to build their businesses with creative material they have stolen from others.”

Internet service providers and free-expression groups have heartily welcomes the ruling.

“Without this decision, user-generated content would dry up and the internet would cease to be a participatory medium,” David Sohn, a lawyer for the Center for Democracy & Technology, said.