14 DAY TRIAL // The Mountain View super giant Google is again sent to the judge as its video sharing platform YouTube published several Village People clips which apparently infringed the copyrights of the owners. John Giacobbi, president of Web Sheriff, sustained that Internet users uploaded several videos containing a mix of the Village People YMCA and an Adolf Hitler dance clip, although nobody allowed them to do so. According to CNET, YouTube received approximately 500 removal demands from the copyright owners but, even if the employees remove them, the users quickly upload them back.
"It's highly inappropriate. Consider that the song's composers were both Jewish. It's not funny. It's stupid and hurtful," the Web Sheriff official said for CNET. Web Sheriff is a company that struggles to discover copyright content on the web and take further action to remove them. Last week, the same company was contacted by Prince who wanted to remove all his clips from the popular video sharing YouTube.
As always, YouTube is protected by the DMCA act which states that a technology similar to Google's video service cannot be accused of copyright infringement since the content is uploaded by the users. "Most content owners understand that we respect copyrights. We work every day to help them manage their content, and we are developing state-of-the-art tools to let them do that even better," Zahavah Levine, YouTube's chief counsel, replied in an email for the same source.
This case is somehow similar with the one involving Daniella Cicarelli, Ronaldo's ex-wife who also sued YouTube for copyright infringement. In case you don't know, Daniella Cicarelli accused the super giant Google of publishing her videos without authorization. The Mountain View company defended itself by sustaining they removed the videos several times but the users uploaded them back. However, Google won the lawsuit and Daniella was forced to pay all the lawsuit fees.