German rules against YouTube in rights case

Apr 20, 2012

(AP) -- A German court has ruled that online video platform YouTube must install filters to prevent users from uploading some music videos whose rights are held by a music-royalties collecting body.

German news agency dapd reported that the Hamburg state court on Friday mostly sided with Germany's GEMA, which represents about 60,000 German writers and musicians.

GEMA took Inc.'s unit to court over 12 temporarily uploaded for which no royalties were paid.

YouTube has maintained that it bears no legal responsibility for the uploaded content - saying it checks and sometimes blocks content when users alert the firm about alleged violations of laws.

It was not immediately clear whether the ruling will be appealed.

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slack
1 / 5 (1) Apr 20, 2012
If this ruling ever survives, it will be interesting to see how these 'filters' will recognize the target videos.
Because once this starts, every copyrighted video and musical piece uploaded to the internet will potentially need to be filtered, so you can't expect the ISPs or the database owners to define potentially millions of filter parameters...

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