After knocking out Viacom in the US over copyrighted videos submitted by users, it looks as if the German courts did not rule in YouTube’s favor.
Google Inc.’s YouTube video service lost a Hamburg court ruling over copyrighted video material that was posted online without permission for rebroadcast.
YouTube may be liable for damages involving material shown in violation of copyright law, the Hamburg Regional Court said today in an e-mailed statement. (SFGate.com)
Even though Google has a fairly strong content ID service, it seems as if a few videos sneaked through its defenses (thus the reason for the lawsuit).
Google is already appealing the ruling, which has the potential of handicapping not only YouTube, but every other hosting service in the country (as manually pre-screening every user submitted content could stall the growth of many German tech companies).
Hopefully the higher courts will be able to see YouTube’s reasoning (or rather the reasoning behind America’s Digital Millenium Copyright Act) lest Germans lose out on one of the largest video sites on the web.
Originally posted on September 3, 2010 @ 4:02 pm