YouTube's Original Nemesis Joins NY Class Action

Posted by Matthew Belloni

It's one of our favorite subjects, so we'll be checking in periodically with updates on the copyright mess surrounding YouTube. As reported in today's THR, Robert Tur, the video journalist as well-known for his airborne footage of the LA riots and OJ Simpson's slow-speed chase as he is for the lawsuits he's filed against the likes of Disney and CBS, has been granted permission to drop his LA-based case against YouTube and join the pending New York-based class action. Here's Judge Florence-Marie Cooper's Friday decision granting the dismissal without prejudice over YouTube's objection (it wanted Tur to pay $370K in fees, but the judge shot that request down). 

Besides being an interesting character, Tur was the first person to sue YouTube for copyright infringement (he filed his complaint in summer 2006, when YouTube was merely an apple in Google's eye), so his case was being watched closely (and nervously) by Viacom and the other plaintiffs. Tur is  also something of a litigation maverick in that he tends to fight his cases to the finish line (for better or worse). We'll see how that personality mixes with the class-action plaintiffs.

He now joins lead plaintiff the U.K. Premiere League and others including the National Music Publishers Association in the proposed class action (FYI: They're still recruiting. Have you or a loved one been infringed by YouTube? Click here). Louis Solomon and a team at New York megafirm Proskauer Rose  is repping the plaintiffs in conjunction with class-action specialists Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann. That muscle should be helpful in what will likely be a nasty discovery battle with YouTube, repped by Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati with Chicago-based trial lawyer Philip Beck.

Tur's personal legal team was decidedly less well-stocked (he's repped by Santa Monica sole practitioner Francis Pizzulli, whose litigation of the case Judge Cooper called "inartful at times"). Of course, Viacom's $1billion case is the one everyone cares about. It's repped by Don Verrilli of Grokster fame and THR's Power Lawyers list. All sides say they're gearing up for a fight to the death over whether we should be able to watch snippets of Parisa fighting with Trisha on "The Real World: Sydney" through YouTube.