Dave Horvath
5 Dec 2006 10:00
A letter recently was sent to CEO Chad Hurley or YouTube by the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC), in protest of their continued failure to proactively remove copyrighted materials from their website. JASRAC's main complaint in the matter was that YouTube has no policy in place to monitor content put onto the site by users and will not remove said copyrighted material until there is a formal complaint or threat of lawsuit issued to them.
One snippet from the offical letter sent by JASRAC and 22 other Japanese companies stated, "Taking into account the current status of your service, we believe that your company should not just wait for rights owners to take the 'Notice and Take down' procedures but should bear the responsibility to prevent, in advance, copyright infringements such as illegal uploads and distributions, or to avoid those infringements".
This new protest comes just a month and a half after YouTube was forced to remove some 29,549 files that infringed on the copyrights of 23 Japanese media companies. Neither this complaint or YouTubes removal of the files stopped users from consistantly uploading copyrighted material to the website for public consumption.
The letter went on to say "We are seriously concerned about the current situation where the Notice and Takedown scheme, aimed [at preventing] copyright infringements, is not functioning well due to the large amount of illegal uploads. While we expect you to promptly take adequate and necessary measures to prevent copyright infringement on the YouTube Web site, until you do so, we request you to take provisional measures ... in order to prevent illegal uploads of audio-visual works, which copyrights are neither owned by the persons posting the works on the Web site themselves nor licensed by the right owners".
One of the recommended actions suggested by JASRAC was to post a message on the YouTube website in Japanese stating that posting copyrighted materials may be illegal and can result in civil and criminal actions. No word from YouTube yet as far as a response.
Source:
InfoWorld