Get serious Japanese tell YouTube

By Stan Beer
Wednesday, 06 December 2006 15:50

Home IT

Just about everybody who is anybody in the Japanese video production business has sent a thinly veiled warning in the form of a letter to the founders of YouTube to start getting serious about preventing copyright video content from being posted to its site. The Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) and 22 other organizations want YouTube to take a proactive rather than its current reactive stance against copyright violations.

YouTube's current policy is to remove videos which violate copyright if requested to do so by the copyright holder. In November, it responded to a request from JASRAC to do exactly that and removed nearly 30,000 Japanese videos from the site.

Despite the action of Google-owned YouTube, however, many Japanese copyright videos have once again been posted to the site, which has highlighted a weakness in the YouTube policy and incensed Japanese copyright holders.

As a result, JASRAC and another 22 peak organizations representing the major video, film and TV broadcasters in Japan sent a letter to YouTube CEO Chad Hurley and CTO Steve Chen demanding that the company implement a proactive system of identifying and removing copyright infringements rather than waiting for requests. Interestingly, the group also includes the Japanese branch of Google nemesis Yahoo.

The Japanese group also demanded that until YouTube implements proactive anti-copyright technology, the video sharing site should post a message in Japanese warning users that they may be prosecuted for posting copyright infringing videos, keep a register of names and addresses and terminate accounts of illegal posters.

So far, the Japanese group has stopped short of threatening to sue YouTube, unlike Universal Music which is suing social networking site MySpace for similar alleged violations of copyright. However, the group has imposed a deadline of December 15 for YouTube to respond to its demands.