Google’s legal woes increase

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By Stevie Smith Aug 7, 2007, 12:42 GMT

The list of disgruntled businesses lodging legal complaints against Google’s YouTube has grown once again this week after the English Premier League and music publisher Bourne & Co. confirmed that eight more parties have joined their copyright infringement lawsuit. Specifically, the likes of the Rugby Football League, the Finnish Football Association, and the National Music Publishers’ Association have thrown their collective weight behind the Premier League’s initial class action against the hugely popular video-sharing Web site for the illegal posting of copyrighted sports clips and other material.A related Reuters report outlines that various video programming owners are now joining forces against Google’s YouTube, accusing the user-created content service of deliberately failing to prevent the posting of copyrighted content in order to bolster site traffic and create focused public attention. From Google’s perspective, it insists that it is following Internet protection laws that prevent its liability based on swift reaction to those who register complaints regarding specific content."The clear and growing message to YouTube and Google is simple," warned Premier League spokesman Dan Johnson in an official statement regarding the copyright infringement case, "their callous and opportunistic business model is contrary to right, contrary to law, and must and will be stopped."The Premier League’s class action lawsuit against YouTube was initially filed in May of this year at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, to which Google responded by saying that such suits revealed a misunderstanding of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which, it said, "balances the rights of copyright holders against the need to protect Internet communications and content."Despite several copyright infringement lawsuits having already landed squarely at Google’s door since its $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube in October 2006, the Internet search titan recently revealed it is close to implementing a filtering system designed to prevent the posting of copyrighted material.Specifically, Google Inc. CEO Eric E. Schmidt said at April’s NAB Convention in Las Vegas that YouTube was close to introducing the "Claim Your Content" filtration system, which would automatically flag copyrighted content for removal from YouTube’s pages. On June 13, a Google spokesman revealed that the system was a matter of days away from shifting into its official testing phase.

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