James Delahunty
15 Apr 2007 19:17
A 15 year old boy in Australia caused the removal of hundreds of video clips from Google Inc.'s YouTube service by pretending to be an employee of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). He sent a signed letter to YouTube falsely claiming he represented ABC, and asked the site to remove clips of a popular local comedy series that were uploaded by users of the site.
Shortly after, lawyers for ABC contacted the boy and he apologized for his actions. "Everyone does dumb stuff when they are 15," the head of ABC television comedy, Courtney Gibson, told ABC Radio. "We really appreciate that he's apologized and we'll be following up with him next week." She said it wasn't clear why the teenager decided to take the action.
YouTube does not block video content subject to copyright from being uploaded to the site, but will remove it once requested by the copyright holder. Viacom Inc. has sued Google Inc. and YouTube for more than $1 billion, accusing it of copyright infringement for allowing users to upload its video content.
Source:
Yahoo