The U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California dismissed the copyright infringement case filed by an adult entertainment company, Io Group, against video service website Veoh.

The legal dispute started in 2006, when Io Group accused Veoh of uploading copyrighted material to its website. The adult-entertainment company argued that Veoh did not take the necessary measures to prevent copyrighted material from reaching its website.

However, Veoh defended its position under the “safe harbor” protections of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), which protects it from liability as long as it removes the copyrighted material when alerted by the copyright owner.

In his ruling, judge Howard Lloyd concluded that the decision made is restricted to the particular combination of facts in this case and that it is not intended “to push bounds of the safe harbor so wide that less than scrupulous service providers may claim its protection.”

Furthermore, he added that Veoh has a strong DMCA policy, taking the active steps to limit incidents of infringement on its website, as well as working on keeping unauthorized works off its website.

This decision casts a lot of hope in YouTube’s case as well, as the video site still awaits the decision in the lawsuit filed against them by Viacom.

“It is great to see the Court confirm that the DCA protects services like YouTube that follow the law and respect copyright,” YouTube Chief Counsel Zehavah Levine said in a statement. “We work every day to give content owners choices about whether to take down, leave up, or even earn revenue from their videos, and we are developing state-of-the-art tools to let them do that even better.”

Last month, Viacom agreed to the anonymization of YouTube user logs before using them to prove their copyright infringement allegations against YouTube. Viacom alleges that Google, which owns YouTube, did absolutely nothing to stop the upload of copyrighted videos on YouTube.