In February 2007, Viacom demanded that YouTube remove Rook's documentary about a professional wrestler, accusing him of using some of the company's copyright material. The conglomerate was mistaken. None of the video or music Rook included in his film belonged to Viacom. Executives at the company apologized but the filmmaker still had to wait three weeks before the clip was reposted to YouTube, which he says hurt his efforts to market the film.

The entire episode would have never occurred had "Viacom ever looked at the video," Rook claims.

Copyright owners, such as NBC Universal, Warner Bros., and Viacom were put on notice Wednesday when U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel ruled that they must not order video be removed from Web sites indiscriminately. Before taking action against a clip, copyright owners, must form a "good-faith belief " that a video is infringing, according to Corynne McSherry, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

But Universal also argued before Fogel that it's not up to copyright owners to determine fair use.

Fogel disagreed. In his 10-page decision, he reminds Universal that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act already requires copyright owners to make a determination about fair use prior to sending take-down notices. "A consideration of the applicability of the fair use doctrine simply is part of that initial review," Fogel wrote.

But for copyright owners, Fogel's decision may further complicate an already arduous process of tracking and removing pirated clips.

"Viacom has no alternative accept to repeatedly search the entire YouTube library," the letter continued, "and send take-down notices... This is a massive effort. We have manually reviewed over 1.7 million clips on YouTube and have identified more than 187,000 pirated clips of our copyrighted content. In an effort of this scale, some inadvertent error is inevitable."

Fogel agreed and the wrote: "The unnecessary removal of non-infringing material causes significant injury to the public where time-sensitive or controversial subjects are involved and the counter-notification remedy does not sufficiently address these harms."