Companies sued YouTube

New York, Saturday, July 28, 2007

YouTube, owned by Google Inc was being sued by Viacom International Inc. and England's top soccer league and an indie music publisher — The Football Association Premier League Ltd. and publisher Bourne Co.
Viacom sought $1 billion in damages for what it said was unauthorized viewing of programs from MTV, Comedy Central and other networks, such as "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." In their lawsuit, the soccer league and indie music publisher sought unspecified damages and any profits YouTube made as a result of the sharing of copyrighted videos.
Donald B. Verrilli, Jr., a lawyer for Viacom, said it would take the next year to identify the extent of infringement that continues happening on "a very massive scale."
To overcome future incident, YouTube is currently working on a video recognition technology that allows those holding copyrights on video to provide a digital fingerprint, so that if anyone tries to share a copyrighted video, the system will shut it down within a minute or so. Google believes that the new technology goes way beyond what the law requires to stop copyright infringement software and therefore will help eliminate such dispute in the future.
My friend, one billion is hell a lot of money. That how copyrights law is. Most of the time we are unaware that such matter relating to copyrights would harm us in someway or another. No one is aware that YouTube is infringement of video copyrights until someone come up and say, “Hey, you violating the copyrights acts, I will sue you for damages”. Just imagine if Google has not brought over YouTube. My guess is the owner and founder of YouTube will be cooked and fried if they are convicted and asked to pay the lawsuit.
Have you ever thought that you might infringe copyrights acts in someway or another? What about all those MP3 songs you download into your cellphone, CD, HD, tapes and many more. Have you ever consider that it might be an illegal copy? For now, it may be safe to ignore it but sooner or later the time will come and you better be prepare to face the consequences.
Full info can be found at: Foxnews