Video hosting site Veoh won another legal victory during the holidays in a lawsuit over hosting uploaded copyrighted content.

According to Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the victory over Universal Music Group should “put to rest the argument that transcoding and other activities necessary for making content accessible on the web are not covered by” DMCA safe harbour provisions for storing material on behalf of users.

UMG made the same argument as previous suits: that Veoh should be liable for hosting copyrighted material. The court disagreed. Last year, Veoh won a similar victory against adult video purveyor Io Group.

Had UMG won, all Web hosts would lose their safe harbour as soon as this sort of uploaded content was made public. YouTube should cheer the ruling as it will likely help it in its battle with Viacom.