14 DAY TRIAL // The FBI managed to catch the famous YouTube pirate who uploaded three episodes of "24" on the online video sharing service even before they were released by Fox. At that time, the Twentieth Century Fox officials sent a subpoena to the parent company Google to require more details about the user who uploaded the clips. The Mountain View firm said that the videos were published by a member using the alias ECOtotal with a week before the official release date. However, the US authorities investigated the case and managed to catch Jorge Romero, the YouTuber who uploaded the clips.
"We are grateful for the FBI and U.S. Attorney's offices in Los Angeles for aggressively pursuing this matter, and we hope it will serve as a powerful warning that uploading copyrighted TV shows and movies to the Internet can be a crime with significant penalties and will be prosecuted as such," Twentieth Century Fox said in a statement according to Daily Tech.
The same source reported that the authorities would charge him for "uploading copyrighted material to a publicly accessible computer network knowing the work was intended for commercial distribution." The maximum sentence for this type of illegality is usually three years of prison.
As you can see, the copyright infringement cases are dangerous for both users and the online video sharing service but, as long as YouTube is protected by the DMCA, the entire responsibility is transferred to the uploader. This case is very relevant because Twentieth Century Fox avoided to accuse YouTube for copyright infringement and went straight to the source of the pirated clips. Anyway, Google's video service remains one of the most popular names in the court rooms as the parent company was sued for an impressive number of times.
Most of the complaints were claiming that Google uploaded videos without authorization, YouTube infringing their copyrights. The last and the most famous lawsuits was fled by Viacom that also required $1 billion in damages.