Vienna court stated that YouTube is not pure intermediary

Vienna Commercial Court vested a groundbreaking preliminary decision, stating that YouTube is not a pure intermediary and that it should prevent third parties to upload material that violates someone else copyright. The case was initiated based on the lawsuit of Austrian commercial TV channel Puls4 against YouTube. Plus4 argued that content from its channel was posted on Youtube without its permission and hence presents the violation of its copyrights. Youtube stated that according to safe harbor rules in E-Commerce directive, it should not be liable since it acts as a pure intermediary. However, the court ruled that since YouTube is sorting, filtering and linking content on its platform, in particular by creating tables of contents according to predefined categories, it can not be considered as a pure intermediary and rely on safe harbor provisions. This is still not final decision since both parties have four weeks for the petition before court vest final decision upon this matter.