German Court Orders YouTube to Filter Content, Remove Videos

[Sadik B]

This is interesting...

A German court on Friday ordered Google to install filtering software on its YouTube service in Germany to prevent users from uploading copyrighted material.

Hamburg's state court sided with German copyright organization GEMA, which had sued Google's YouTube unit two years ago to have 12 music videos for which it holds copyrights be taken down, the Associated Press reported Friday. GEMA, which represents about 64,000 German writers and musicians, argued that its members were losing money when their music was displayed on YouTube.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2403348,00.asp

 

[MagnusB]

I would be interested to see if GEMA could ever prove that once the videos have been removed revenue goes up.

 

[Slavik]

Its rediculous. Google should just block all german users from viewing youtube and see how long it takes before they overturn the ruling.

 

[yavuz]

Every other video is currently blocked already and it has gotten impossible to watch a music video. Even official channels are blocked.

So what happens is I'm going to other websites and usually find that video. Blocking these videos is not a solution but helping people go further underground. There is always a way...

 

[Sadik B]

Well, it all comes down to the fact that law makers and corporates feel that they are unable to "control" the internet, while they have little understanding of how technology works. I firmly believe that stopping online music and movie piracy is impossible, unless the music and entertainment industry can invest money in coming up with a technology that helps sharing while at the same time generating revenue for them. Any attempt to filter internet sharing is going to fail for every door you can close (think megavideo) hundreds other open up.

The industry should really pioneer research into perhaps monetizing p2p and video sharing for revenue and use the internet in their favor instead of trying to block people...

Well... anyways, anyone heard of the new kid on the block? It's called CISPA and it's bigger and better!

 

[Lucas]

This is a pretty lame move, IMO. YouTube constantly works to take down infringing users, I don't see why they would get harsher with YouTube, I guess companies want the money gained from the hits of the videos that include their content, sounds dumb anyways.

 

[Sador]

Its rediculous. Google should just block all german users from viewing youtube and see how long it takes before they overturn the ruling.

Agreed on that one.

I also think all those groups who complain about these sort of violations, should go after google, as that's the easiest way to find illegal / copyrighted stuff. Let's see how that would go for them.

 

[Adam Howard]

They want to control the Internet and they only way they could ever do that 100% is to shut it down. It is impossible to control the world wide web. The genie is already out of the bottle.

 

[Pereira]

... or they want to deal with legitimate copyright claims but fail to understanding the complexity of the interwebz thus leading to the tin foil hat folks coming up with their unbelievably idiotic and ignorant conspiracy theory's!