YOUTUBE celebrated its fifth birthday this month with the announcement that it now receives up to 2bn hits daily. Bought by Google for around £1.2bn in 2006, YouTube was one of the first examples of user-generated content online.

As YouTube became phenomenally popular, users began to post all kinds of content on the site and it first ran into trouble when copyrighted content belonging to film and television studios or record companies started to appear.

By copying the material onto its server and making it available to the public, YouTube became every bit as liable for infringement as the original uploader.

This is the issue at stake in an ongoing dispute with Viacom, one of the world’s largest media conglomerates and owner of high-value brands such as MTV and Nickelodeon.

In 2007, Viacom sued Google for $1bn after entire series of its most popular TV shows showed up on YouTube. Viacom argued that YouTube survived solely upon large-scale copyright infringement, and in response Google claimed that Viacom leaked material onto the site to support its case.

The case is ongoing and, in the UK, the courts would probably decide the case in Viacom’s favour. This is largely due to the introduction of the Digital Economy Act 2010 which places obligations on internet service providers to provide “copyright infringement lists” to content owners and contains the power to limit access to for alleged infringers.

With this outcome, Google would lose a large percentage of its profits and potentially everything posted online would need to be checked first.

If Viacom was unsuccessful, it would lose a large amount of revenue.

The internet will, in all probability, not remain a legal black hole for long.

However, it is debatable whether YouTube will make it to its 10th birthday if infringing content was removed from our screens.