On its Japanese version of the service

Feb 6, 2007 15:41 GMT  ·  By

At this time, YouTube is the leader of the online video sharing services, allowing you to upload, share and comment videos with other members of the community. As you might know, the solution was acquired by Google in October 2006 for $1.6 billion and is continuously updated by the search giant to become even more powerful. Let's take for example TestTube: it is a testing platform implemented to the video service that allows the company and users to test all the new features before they will be included in the final version of YouTube. It is inspired by Google's Labs, a similar product that tests all the functions meant to be a part of Google's applications.

Because YouTube works with video files, the company encountered a lot of copyright infringement lawsuits, being accused for publishing movies without authorization. One of the most recent cases concerns Daniella Cicarelli, Ronaldo's ex-wife that sued YouTube for publishing videos with the Brazilian model without approval. At that time, a Brazilian court decided to block the service in the country until the company removes all the videos displaying Daniella.

A few days ago, Viacom, the MTV provider, ordered YouTube to remove almost 100.000 clips from the website because it considers that the search giant receives praises with content offered by other companies. Although Google encountered several problems, Warner Music Group established a powerful partnership to display its content on YouTube's page.

Today, it seems like the search giant agreed to include anti-piracy warnings on the Japanese version of YouTube, encouraging users to publish only videos that are not infringing any copyright.

"Google Inc.'s YouTube.com agreed to display warnings on its Web site in Japanese not to upload copyright materials to the popular Internet service, a group of Japanese media firms said on Tuesday. The decision comes as a part of ongoing talks between YouTube and Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC), which last year pushed the American firm to erase 30,000 clips from its pages because of copyright infringement," Playfuls reported.