A Spanish court junked Thursday a copyright infringement suit by a private TV channel against video-sharing site YouTube.

Google Inc., the owner of YouTube, hailed the court ruling clearing the latter of responsibility in screening videos uploaded on its site.

The lawsuit filed by Spain's Telecinco had charged that the posting of episodes of its shows on YouTube violate its intellectual property rights.

The court initially favored Telecinco with a 2008 ruling ordering YouTube to suspend broadcasting of the Spanish TV channel's videos. In its final decision made Monday, however, the court reversed its ruling citing that YouTube is not a supplier of content and that it is physically impossible to control more than 500 million videos on the site.

According to the ruling, screening all videos, photos and text before showing these on the website will stop social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.

The court ruled that YouTube can only cooperate with copyright holders in withdrawing illegal content from the site.