YouTube will be hiring more lawyers and policy wonks, we suspect, following a week of complaints and legal challenges to the content that is stored on their servers and show to people around the world.
Yesterday the House of Commons’ Culture, Media and Sport Committee published a report (PDF) with included “Risks from the Internet, particularly social networking sites and sites hosting user-generated content.” Most of the media used this to focus on YouTube and how evil it is.
This has continued today with The Times running a story on a “YouTube gang rape,” going on to voice that “YouTube is failing to do enough to protect children from the ‘dark side’ of the Internet.”
Mediaset To Sue
Yesterday Mediaset, controlled by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, filed legal action against YouTube for at least €500 million (£393.3 million, ~$779 million).
They claim that they’d identified 4,643 video clips of Mediaset-owned material that was available on June 10 alone.
Mediaset that this claim is an initial claim and didn’t take into account their losses to sell advertising against the content.
Viacom are also in the process of trying to .
Not a surprise
We’d imagine that this won’t be a surprise to YouTube, now they’re owned by Google, people suing them know that the winning actions against them could return a very high amount of money, from Google’s deep pockets.
Google launched tools to combat copyrighted material being uploaded to YouTube way back in October 2007, which we would think would lessen or weaken any legal action against them.
“We’d imagine that this won’t be a surprise to YouTube, now their owned by Google…”
For the love of God it’s they’re, short for they are not their! Any school ages child worth their pencil could tell you that.
Absolutly shocking that that mistake got through.
Thanks Wm O’Brien BSc – you’re right and yes, it’s shocking.
Someone has been spanked for this … problem was, they enjoyed it, so they may do it again in the future :)