An Indian music label has filed a suit against Google and its video sharing site YouTube after the display on YouTube of content on which the Indian company says it holds copyright.
Super Cassettes Industries is seeking a permanent injunction and damages on the dissemination and display on YouTube of the content and on Monday obtained an interim restraint order in the High Court in Delhi. That means Google, which was not represented at the proceedings, has to remove the content until the final order is decided.
“We had communicated several times to YouTube and to Google both in India and the U.S. to remove the content that infringes our copyrights,” said Amit Sibal, lawyer for Super Cassettes in a telephone interview on Wednesday.
Big surprise? Certainly not. Some companies may be slow to draw their gun, but they will certainly draw it at one point.
YouTube is no where near over their share of law suits and copyright infringements. Google has a long battle to fight on this one.
But what is Google’s defense of these accusations?
“We don’t hold the telephone company liable when two callers use the phone lines to plan a crime,” Rishi Jaitly, a policy analyst at Google India said in a Google blog in October. “For the same reasons, it’s a fundamental principle of the Internet that you don’t blame the neutral intermediaries for the actions of their customers,” Jaitly added.
Google, that’s a weak response.
While I agree it’s tough to manage third-party contributions such as platforms like YouTube are based on, there needs to be a level of moderations in there.
Google needs to ask themselves this question. Would it be more expensive to hire a staff to moderate all videos coming into YouTube or would it be more expensive to fight all the law suits?
I’m going to have to opt for hiring more staff on this one.
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