Mediaset V/S Google

Google has been sued yet again by an Italian media group, Mediaset on the allegation of illegally using the copyrighted videos on commercial basis, on one of its most visited and largest video sharing site YouTube.

Mediaset has claimed about €500m ($779m) in the infringement lawsuit filed by Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi-- who controls Mediaset-- in an Italian civil court.

However, YouTube remarked that it “respects copyright holders and takes copyright issues very seriously. There is no need for legal action and all the associated costs”.

This is not the first time Google is in trouble, the search engine giant had also been sued by Viacom in the US and Telecinco, the Spanish broadcaster, the quagmire of these cases is still going on.

Nothing can be said until the court passes a ruling in this context. But one thing is certain that the web master is badly trapped in many sorts of legal battles.

The industry is furious about YouTube’s non-conformity to both the copyright and infringement laws and rules.

Berlusconi said the all the damages and losses from advertising revenues would be recovered through the claim.

About 4,643 clips of Mediaset were made available on YouTube for more than 325 hours (as calculated on June 10 2008). And an estimated total loss equals 315,672 viewing days on its three Italian television channels.

“Broadcasters want to establish that video content sites themselves are responsible for infringing copyright by communicating the content to the public. These sites claim the benefit of the safe harbours provided by the E-commerce Directive as mere conduit or host.” Joel Smith, intellectual property partner at legal firm Herbert Smith, cited.

YouTube acknowledged that it removed infringing clips immediately after it allowed and facilitated content owners to figure out infringing clips with the aid of video-recognition technology.

Big media houses like Viacom, CBS and Disney are signatories of video-sharing sites such as MySpace, Veoh and Dailymotion who follow a frame of “collaborative principles”, under which filtering technologies are employed that successfully halt the uploading process of the infringing content and hence, does not permit such material to get published on the site.

While in contrast, Google has not joined hands to promote any such effort and does not use any filtering technology in this regard to chuck out infringing content.