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Court: YouTube liable for copyright breaches
Published: 20 Apr 12 15:51 CET | Print version
Online: http://www.thelocal.de/money/20120420-42079.html
A German court ruled on Friday that Google's video sharing service YouTube is responsible when users post copyrighted music clips without permission. The decision could cost YouTube millions in royalties.
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The Hamburg court ruled that YouTube was responsible for making sure that any uploaded videos did not breach copyright and ordered it take down seven of the 12 clips concerned.
In the five other cases, the lawsuit was formally withdrawn because there was no evidence that the videos had been uploaded to the site.
Apart from ruling that YouTube was responsible for the actions of its users, the court also said that individuals who uploaded the videos again could face a fine of up to €250,000, or a custodial sentence of up to six months for violating court orders.
YouTube must install filters to prevent users from uploading copyrighted music videos without permission, it said.
YouTube said it took no responsibility for what users did but said it always responded when told of copyright violations.
GEMA represents about 60,000 German song writers and musicians.
The ruling represents the culmination of a legal battle between GEMA and YouTube that has dragged on since 2009, when the last contract between them expired. After no follow-up agreement was reached, GEMA sued YouTube in 2010.
AFP/The Local/bk
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Your comments about this article:
The freshest German legislation regulating copyright is from 1965 and the name Gema is speaking for itself: Gesellschaft für musikalische Aufführungs- und mechanische Vervielfältigungsrechte
And they should go ahead and protect the 60k artists they have or whatever. Protect away, I'm not interested in them. But let me have access to all the other stuff.
This is why people start illegal downloading. So many unnecessary barriers.
GEMA that thinks it can tell anyone what you can do with videos and music, but if consumers boycott the artists that support them, they won't be around for long....
Also GEMA doesn't understand that each time people read the Youtube message "Unfortunately, this video is not available in Germany because GEMA has not granted the respective music rights.", they are not turning against Youtube but against GEMA.
GEMA may have won the court case but it has already lost the PR battle.
Lost number one exporter to China this is part of the come back.
There are two ways of reading this: either YouTube must identify what is and what isn't GEMA copyrighted or GEMA must supply a way of identifying what falls under its copyright. As both require a high degree of magic, it's difficult to take the order seriously.
The fundamental problem is that anything can be copyrighted by anybody. I can put a copyright notice on this post - even if it's against the T&Cs of The Local if I can show that the The Local's T&Cs are invalid my copyright notice will stand. As written above, the order is silly because YouTube would not be able to upload anything and be sure it's not copyrighted by anybody.
There are ways of watermarking music and video files which, if GEMA watermerked all of their DVDs etc might catch some copyrighted material but converting it back to video and re-encoding it - possible on just about any smartphone - will beat many schemes.
If I were Google, I would be having quite a few serious meetings about now with the option of blocking Germany from YouTube on the agenda. It's the only technical solution that will meet the order as written above.
Also they can repeat what they did with google in main land china and redirect all German traffic for youtube to an international advertisement free youtube in a foreign sever, that way youtube would not make any money but could undermine GEMA. GEMA can not claim money if youtube is not set up as a regional or business unit in Germany.
So far so good the artist in question is a singer songwriter and is not German has nothing to do with GEMA ,however I could not watch the video ,just look on a different site till you tube and google put these dinosaurs out the way.