Brazil tries to shutdown Youtube but has no chance whatsoever

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 05 January 2007 20:20

Your IT - Home IT

A sex scandal in Brazil has seen a Brazilian judge order the shutdown of Youtube. As if that’s going to happen!

The former wife of Brazilian soccer/football star Ronaldo, Daniela Cicarelli, was filmed with Brazilian banker Renato Malzoni on a beach. The apparently quite x-rated clip was put onto Youtube, and while Cicarelli has been successful at getting Youtube to remove the clip, it keeps getting re-loaded into Youtube by Cicarelli’s fans.

So Cicarelli and Malzoni kept on going back to the courts to get some permanent action from Youtube on the issue. Of course, it’s all rather pointless now, as the footage is out there and there’s no way of hiding the clip once it has gone onto the Internet.

A Brazilian judge, however, agreed with Cicarelli and has asked Youtube to find some way of permanently blocking the clip, and is threatening a daily fine of US $119,000 if Youtube don’t comply. Naturally, there has been no comment from Youtube as yet, as they scratch their heads probably wondering if the judge has ever used the Internet before.

One of the ways the file keeps on re-appearing on Youtube is by users changing the file name of the clip. Even Youtube’s content filtering technology, which is late and was due to appear by the end of 2006, may not be enough to stop the clip permanently.

Of course this raises another issue for Youtube. If they can’t stop this clip from appearing on their website, how will they truly ever be able to effectively police pirate content and remove it from the site without direct human intervention?

Ah, the dilemma of suppressing information freedom on the world’s freest medium, the Internet. Good luck, Daniela Cicarelli… you’re going to need it!