US news agency sues YouTube

By Simon Aughton

Posted on 19 Jul 2006 at 12:35

A US video news agency is suing YouTube for allowing users to upload video footage shot by the agency.

The Los Angeles News Service claims that YouTube breached its copyright on several occasions, with one clip viewed more than 1,000 times in a single week.

'The scope of the infringements is akin to a murky moving target, in that videos uploaded are not identified by copyright owner or registration number but rather by the uploader's idiosyncratic choice of descriptive terms to describe the content of the video - tags - making it extremely impractical to identify plaintiff's copyrighted works,' said Robert Tur, the agency's owner.

Tur is seeking $150,000 for each work infringed upon and a court order enjoining YouTube from allowing his work to be posted on the Web site.

Daniel Pearl, deputy editor of the BBC's Newsnight programme, asked on the corporation's The Editors blog how YouTube gets away with hosting many hours of copyright material, while the UK broadcaster is 'obliged to take copyright issues extremely seriously'.

'In fact if you search for Newsnight on YouTube you'll find a whole range of our films and discussions,' Peal wrote. 'Currently, over 20,000 people have watched Kirsty's [Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark] interview with Pete Doherty - a smaller number (71) have watched Peter Marshall's expose of British corruption in Saudi contracts - or as described on YouTube: "An exclusive and gutsy report from the beebs [sic] flagship news programme." As more and more people get their TV over the Web, these questions are bound to become more important.'

In fact YouTube has so far escaped censure because it is subject to US laws that protect it from the consequences of content that is uploaded by its users. Under the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act, YouTube is classified as an 'online provider', much like an ISP, and therefore immune from prosecution for material held on its servers, in the same way that ISPs cannot be prosecuted for file sharing or illegal content that passes over their networks. For that reason the US music industry, in the guise of the RIAA, has targeted users, rather than YouTube, in an attempt to have karaoke videos removed from the site.

But YouTube's immunity will evaporate once the website realises plans to increase revenues through advertising, which is currently conspicuous by its absence from the site's video pages.

As EFF attorney Fred von Lohmann told The Hollywood Reporter, the YouTube will lose its DMCA protections if it can be shown to be profiting from the hosting of copyright material, which may make it less-than-attractive to any potential takeover suitors.