14 DAY TRIAL // YouTube's battle with the very aggressive German performance rights group GEMA isn't going well. A court in Hamburg ruled that YouTube hasn't been doing enough to stop music belonging to artists affiliated with GEMA from ending up on the site and that it had to start filtering uploads.
Essentially, this makes YouTube responsible for the videos its users upload, some 60 hours of video every minute.
This could also mean that the site will be forced to pay huge royalties for the music that is licensed by GEMA and available on YouTube.
GEMA, which represents some 60,000 German artists, and other groups sued YouTube for videos that were uploaded to the site by users and for which the site paid no licensing.
YouTube argued that it was not responsible for the stuff its users uploaded and that it took proper action if notified of infringing videos. This was not enough for GEMA and it seems that the German court agrees.
Filtering the tens of hours of video that are uploaded each minute by YouTube is no small task. If it were forced to do so, it would have to vet all videos before publishing them, no matter where the uploader is from and what the video is about.
YouTube's Content ID technology enables it to identify videos that are infringing but only if the copyright holders provided copies of the original video. However, the process takes time and YouTube's scanning is not real-time.
If the site had to scan each video before allowing users to publish it, the process would take significantly longer than it does now. That could be an inconvenience for most people, but it would be a huge impediment for news organizations or citizen journalism, where speed is of the essence. Google has not decided what its next move is, but it is unlikely it will accept the decision.