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YouTube Can Be Liable For Copyright Infringing Videos, Court Rules (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: YouTube is known to be a breeding ground for creators. At the same time, however, it's also regularly used to share copyrighted material without permission. While copyright holders can issue takedown notices to remove infringing content, a preliminary ruling by the Commercial Court in Vienna has decided this is not sufficient. The ruling follows a complaint from local television channel Puls 4. After a thorough review of YouTube's functionalities, the Court concluded that YouTube has an obligation to prevent third parties from uploading infringing content. In its defense, YouTube argued that it's a neutral hosting provider under the provisions of the E-Commerce Act. As such, it should be shielded from direct liability for the actions of users. However, the Commercial Court disagreed, noting that YouTube takes several motivated actions to organize and optimize how videos are displayed. By doing so, it becomes more than a neutral hosting provider.
Venice Austria this time, not California
That is not what the court said. It said that since Youtube's recommendations (and ads) functionality tries to optimize cash flow (both short- and long-term), it's not a neutral provider. Being a neutral provider has nothing to do with removing videos.
It's practically impossible to prevent copyrighted things from being uploaded illegally. So if it comes to that, Google may decide to shut down youtube in the EU because there is no other option. What a shame that would be.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
They can either stop doing it wrong, or start doing it right. Either they stop censoring videos altogether, or they start requiring verification of identity before permitting video uploads. Pretending they can't solve this problem is at best a failure of imagination. They can't solve it without substantially altering the site, but so what? They don't have a right to run it any way they want. There are these things called laws...
YouTube wants to be able to pick winners but doesn't want to keep the floors clean. They need to choose one or the other.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In order to comply with this, if (theoretically) it was enforced world-wide upon YouTube, would be for YouTube to have every video uploaded sit in a private space that only YouTube has access to, and have a human employee of YouTube view the video looking for copyright violations. In essense it would be the death of YouTube.
But wait, there's more: That would set a legal precedent for any media hosting on the entire Internet; everyone, from the largest to the smallest company, would have to do the same vetting of uploaded media in order to protect themselves from liability. Something like Facebook, for instance, would have to have every static photograph uploaded scrutinized, too, to ensure that there's nothing in the background that's IP belonging to anyone who would sue over it.
Theoretically, a ruling like this, if it was upheld worldwide, would more or less destroy the Internet as we know it. The only entities it would serve would be large media companies; the Internet would become, even more so than it is already, just a tool for business and revenue generation, not much of anything in the interests of private individuals. Many companies providing hosting of uploaded media would simply cease to exist or stop offering the ability to upload anything for fear of being legally liable for copyright violation.
The Internet is becoming a slow-motion trainwreck. Between government censorship in so many countries, cybercrime, abuses by people and organizations pushing 'fake news', and ISPs wanting to go back to the 'walled garden' business model, the Internet is slowly but surely becoming unusable.