In a friends-of-the-court brief filed on behalf of Google’s YouTube on Wednesday in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, four prominent Web services – including Yahoo, Facebook, eBay, and IAC/InterActiveCorp – urged a federal judge to dismiss the copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Viacom in 2007.

In the lawsuit, the New York-based Viacom had accused Google’s 2006-acquires popular video-sharing site, YouTube, of grand scale copyright infringement.

As per the allegations leveled by Viacom, the owner of MTV Networks and the Paramount film studio, YouTube is guilty of unauthorized display of 63,000 copyrighted works on its site.

Viacom has accused YouTube of encouraging users to upload clips from Paramount Pictures, Comedy Central, and MTV Networks; and had, in March this year, requested US District Judge Louis Stanton for a summary judgment ruling in its favor.

Meanwhile, siding with Google and YouTube, the four Internet bigwigs argued in the recently-filed friend-of-the-court legal briefs that, according to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Internet service providers are protected from liability for copyright violations that their users commit.

Arguing that a ruling against Google might stifle the growth of important Internet services, attorney Asim Bhansali, who is representing the four companies, said in the brief: “Plaintiffs’ legal arguments, if accepted, would retard the development of the Internet and electronic commerce.”