Netflix had announced in April that it wasn’t going to renew its broad licensing deal with Viacom. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said at the time that his company was in talks with Viacom to possibly strike separate deals for specific shows. A Netflix spokesperson told us Thursday that the company doesn’t have any news to share on that front.

Netflix’s previous deal with Viacom included titles from Nickelodeon, MTV, BET, VH1, Logo and Spike. In a position paper on the future of his company, Hastings said in April that Netflix was using a whole lot of data to evaluate these kinds of deals before deciding to renew them:

“We might pay, for example, $200,000 for a 4 year exclusive subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) license for a given title. At the time of renewal, we evaluate how much the title has been viewed as well as member rating feedback to determine how much we are willing to pay. How many similar titles we have is also a consideration.”

Netflix doesn’t share any of its ratings with the outside world, but the company has made it clear in the past that kids are a very important audience, which even deserved a dedicated UI to further encourage their viewing. And the company recently added a bunch of additional kids content from Disney Junior to its service.

As for the Viacom fare, it’s possible that there may be hope for Dora or any of the other more popular kids shows to return to the service sooner or later. Fans of Teen Mom on the other hand may have to look elsewhere.

This story was updated at 5:45 pm with a mention of Netflix’s new Disney content.

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In the latest twist in a long and closely-watched copyright case brought by Viacom, U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton granted summary judgment to YouTube after finding executives at the video site did not have “red flag” knowledge that made them liable for content uploaded by users.

The ruling comes one year after the Second Court of Appeals reversed Stanton’s earlier decision in 2012 to dismiss the case, and ordered the judge to revisit his ruling in light of emails that suggested the YouTube founders had knowledge of copyright infringement. In his new decision, issued on Thursday Stanton rejected Viacom’s legal theory as “extravagant” and stated that “its foundation is an anachronistic [...] concept.”

On its surface, the case turned on whether YouTube had to pay damages to Viacom for thousands of unauthorized clips of shows like South Park and Seinfeld that appeared on the site. But on a deeper level, the case is significant because it is helping to determine what digital technology companies must do to protect copyright.

Under a law known as the DMCA, online services like YouTube are not responsible for the copyright infringement of their users. The law, which was crafted to ensure that new digital platforms didn’t get smothered by copyright claims, grants “safe harbors” to sites provided they provide a way for owners to take down their content, and so long as the site is not complicit in users’ copyright violations.

Viacom and the entertainment industry, which believes that YouTube have unfairly profited from copyrighted content, had hoped to shrink the scope of the “safe harbors” by drawing attention to the DMCA’s so-called “red flag” provision — a part of the law that means a site is liable if those controlling it are willfully blind to copyright violations.

In deciding to reinstate the case, the appeals court agreed that YouTube was not responsible for most of the clips for which Viacom was claiming over $1 billion dollars. However, it said the potentially incriminating emails required the lower court to examine if YouTube knew or should have known about specific pieces of infringing content.

In the new decision Stanton said Viacom, in its legal arguments, had conceded that it was unable to identify specific examples of specific copyright clips of which the YouTube founders should have been aware. He added that Viacom had tried to solve the situation by claiming that it was YouTube’s responsibility to show they did not know, but that this was a misinterpretation of the law.

Viacom is entitled to appeal Stanton’s decision a second time but its safe harbors argument may be running out of steam. In a similar case involving defunct video service, Veoh, a California appeals court emphatically concluded that the safe harbors applied.

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The operator now wants to invalidate a deal the two parties struck just two months ago, and instead just get the good stuff. You know, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, and maybe a little bit of MTV proper.

Cablevision sent out the following statement about the lawsuit:

“The manner in which Viacom sells its programming is illegal, anti-consumer, and wrong. Viacom effectively forces Cablevision’s customers to pay for and receive little-watched channels in order to get the channels they actually want. Viacom’s abuse of its market power is not only illegal, but also prevents Cablevision from delivering the programming that its customers want and that competes with Viacom’s less popular channels.”

A Viacom spokesperson sent us the following statement in response:

“At the request of distributors, Viacom and other programmers have long offered discounts to those who agree to provide additional network distribution. Many distributors take advantage of these win-win and pro-consumer arrangements. Reflecting the highly competitive cable programming business, these arrangements have been upheld by a number of federal courts and on appeal. Viacom will vigorously defend this transparent attempt by Cablevision to use the courts to renegotiate our existing two month old agreement.”

The lawsuit also alleges that Viacom threatened “massive financial penalties” if Cablevision refused to carry the 14 lesser-watched channels in question. The operator is asking for a permanent injunction that would bar Viacom from bundling its lesser-watched channels with its more popular core offerings.

On paper, this lawsuit is an interesting challenge to the cable bundle, which has been largely dictated by the broadcasters. Operators have long said that they would like to sell their customers smaller and more flexible bundles. Broadcasters have made this impossible by either directly bundling all their channels into one big package, or by other conditions that make sure operators can’t sell bundles without certain channels.

However, it’s unlikely that this lawsuit will be fought out until the bitter end. Because at the core, this is about something else: Broadcasters have in recent years significantly increased the carriage fees for their fares, leading to a number of nasty fights that left consumers without their favorite channels for weeks. In the end, content owners always won, and carriers caved in, agreeing to pay more before their customers have yet another reason to cut the cord.

Cablevision and Viacom negotiated a last-minute carriage agreement in late December. Details of that deal were not made public, but it’s obvious that Cablevision wasn’t happy with the outcome. Now it wants to get a better deal, and threatening the bundle is the biggest asset it has in this fight.

Image courtesy of Flickr user  nyghtowl.

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