New Delhi, Nov 15 (IANS) Entertainment major T-Series has taken the video-sharing website YouTube.com to court, alleging violation of copyrights for its music products.
Bhushan Kumar of T-Series has filed a case against YouTube LLC and its parent company Google Inc in the Delhi High Court.
On Nov 5 the court issued a notice against YouTube LLC and Google Inc. and has passed an interim order restraining them from “reproducing, adapting, distributing, communicating, transmitting, disseminating or displaying on their websites or otherwise infringing in any manner any audio visual works in which the SCIL (Super Cassettes Industries Ltd, which owns the T-Series brand) owns exclusive, valid and subsisting copyright”.
“You can free download and upload on youtube.com and the website is using our promotional materials without seeking our permission,” Kumar said.
“We have been negotiating with them for a long time, but they get away by saying, ‘Surfers are doing it, we are not doing anything’. But they are allowing the surfers to use their website to do the crime and they should pay for it. It is harming our business,” Kumar told IANS on telephone from Mumbai.
“More hits means more revenues. People are flocking the website and it earns revenues in millions from advertisements. It encourages people to upload copyrighted work on the website without obtaining any license or permission from the rightful copyright owners and without paying them any royalty.
“The revenue of the music industry has gone down by 40 to 50 percent because of the illegal websites,” said Kumar.
“Earlier youtube.com was a pirated site. But recently it has been taken over by Google. After the takeover, Google paid a huge amount of money to all the foreign music labels to allow them to use their promotional materials but they are not doing the same for Indian music companies,” he added.
Now YouTube typically follows a policy, wherein it pulls down copyrighted content whenever notified by copyright owners. However, there is no moderation of content before the content is put up.
The restraint order however implies that YouTube and Google will now have to actively go about preventing users from uploading T-Series content onto the YouTube Web site.
In the event the order should become a permanent injunction, it would impact other Indian video sites as well — iShare, Dekhona, thebig.tv, to name a few.
Meanwhile, YouTube, by its own previous admission, is preparing to launch a content identification system that will afford copyright owners a certain degree of control over their content.
The upcoming automated video ID system will check all videos as they are being uploaded, and match them with a ready database of visual representations of copyrighted material, as provided by respective content owners.
Depending on the policy specified by a particular content owner, upon finding a match, the video ID system will either block the content, or post it, or put adverts on it with revenue to be shared with the content owner.
The catch though is that the system will require content owners to provide YouTube with copies of content that they wish to protect.Â
I love watching videos online specially on Youtube. There are lots of music clips, movie clips and instructional videos on Youtube. I love em all.