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More legal trouble for YouTube
05/05/2007 16:33 - (SA)
San Francisco - Plaintiffs including
English soccer's Premier League sued Google Inc's YouTube on Friday for copyright infringement, the second such
legal challenge to the popular video site in two months.
According to court documents filed in the US District
Court for the Southern District of New York, the Football
Association Premier League Ltd, better known as the English
Premier League, and music publisher Bourne Co sued YouTube.
The lawsuit charges that YouTube deliberately encourages
massive copyright infringement on its website to generate
public attention and boost traffic. This has resulted in the
loss of valuable content, the complaint said.
"Defendants, which own and operate the website
YouTube.com, have knowingly misappropriated and exploited this
valuable property for their own gain without payment or license
to the owners of the intellectual property," the lawsuit said.
Google general counsel Kent Walker replied in a statement:
"These suits simply misunderstand the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act, which balances the rights of copyright holders
against the need to protect internet communications and
content, Walker said, referring to the 1998 US law governing
the rights of content owners and internet service providers.
"They threaten the way people legitimately exchange
information, news, entertainment, and political and artistic
expression over the internet," he said.
The complaint echoes accusations made in March by media
conglomerate Viacom Inc, which filed a similar suit against YouTube and Google for over $1bn in damages.
Google has denied those claims using similar arguments.
Lawyers for the Premier League said YouTube provided access
to a tool against copyright infringement, but charged that it
was "fraught" with problems and that YouTube should do more.
"Its account has on some occasions been blocked or closed," the lawsuit said. "In the meantime, the Premier League has been forced to send time-consuming and ineffectual notices of infringement to YouTube."
No wide move vs YouTube
James McQuivey, a media analyst at Forrester, said the
latest complaint was interesting because the plaintiffs had
tried to use the tool provided to prevent copyright
infringement.
But the lawsuit does not likely signal a wider move in the
media industry against YouTube, McQuivey said.
More worrying for Google and YouTube would have been a
lawsuit from a second major entertainment company or a big
cable television network, he added.
The latest lawsuit seeks a court-ordered injunction to
prohibit the defendants from continuing to violate various
copyright protection laws and unspecified monetary damages.
It accuses YouTube of deliberately facilitating copyright
infringement to build traffic to its site and lists a number of
matches between some of English soccer's most popular teams,
including Arsenal, Manchester United, Chelsea and Tottenham.
The complaint, which seeks class-action status, also says
that Google was aware of this pattern of infringement when it
paid $1.65bn to buy YouTube and subsequently saw an
increase of around $4bn in Google's market value.
The suit argues that these billions of dollars still
"vastly understates" the value of the plaintiff's intellectual property and the harm to plaintiffs represented in the suit.
- Reuters
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