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The video hosting website YouTube has been the object of various criticisms.

Copyright

YouTube policy does not give permission for anyone to upload content not permitted by United States copyright law, the organization frequently removing upon request a vast quantity of infringing content.

Despite this, a large amount of potentially infringing content continues to be uploaded, e.g. television shows/clips, film clips, commercials, music videos, or music concerts. This is despite a decision in October 2007 to allow media companies to block their copyrighted video content loaded onto YouTube without seeking any prior permission.

Until 2007, unless a copyright holder reported violation or infringement, YouTube generally discovered such content via indications within the YouTube community through self-policing. For a brief time, individual members could also report on one another. The flagging feature, intended as a means of reporting questionable content, has been subject to considerable abuse; for a time, some users were flagging other users' original content for copyright violations out of spite. YouTube proceeded to remove copyright infringement from the list of flaggable offenses.

Since 2007, changes to the interface mean that only rights holders are able to directly report copyright violations, even if they are obvious to casual viewers.

YouTube generally identifies video content through search terms that uploaders associate with clips. Some deceptive users create alternative search terms when uploading specific file types (similar to the deliberate misspelling of band names on MP3 filesharing networks).

Hollywood remains divided on YouTube, as "'the marketing guys love YouTube and the legal guys hate it.'" Further,

While lawyers are demanding filtering technology, many Hollywood execs actually enjoy the fact that YouTube only takes down clips when they request it. "If I found part of a successful show up on YouTube today, I'd probably pull it down immediately .... If I had a show that wasn't doing so well in the ratings and could use the promotion, I wouldn't be in a rush to do that."

Content owners are not just targeting YouTube for copyright infringements, but are also targeting third party websites that link to infringing content on YouTube and other video-sharing sites, for example, QuickSilverScreen vs. Fox, Daily Episodes vs. Fox, and Columbia vs. Slashfilm. The liability of linking remains a grey area with cases for and against. The law in the U.S. currently leans towards website owners being liable for infringing links although they are often protected by the DMCA providing they take down infringing content when issued with a take down notice. However, a recent court ruling in the U.S. found Google not liable for linking to infringing content (Perfect 10 v. Google, Inc.).

Examples of infringement complaints

On October 5, 2006, the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) finalized their copyright complaints regarding Japanese media on YouTube. Thousands of media from popular Japanese artists (such as Tokyo Jihen and other music including Jpop) were removed.

When CBS and Universal Music Group signed agreements to provide content on YouTube, they announced a new technology to help them find and remove copyrighted material.

TV journalist Robert Tur filed the first lawsuit against the company in the summer of 2006, alleging copyright infringement for hosting a number of famous news clips without permission. The case has yet to be resolved.

On November 9, 2006, Artie Lange said that his lawyers were in talks with YouTube, after Lange learned that his entire DVD, It's the Whiskey Talking, was available for free on the website. He added that he will either demand money from them, or will sue.

Viacom and the British Broadcasting Corporation both demanded YouTube to take down more than 200,000 videos.

Viacom announced it was suing YouTube, and its owner Google, for more than $1 billion in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Viacom claims that YouTube posted over 160,000 of their videos on the website without their permission.

In 2007 a 15-year-old Australian boy managed to get YouTube to delete over 200 YouTube videos belonging to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation using a fake DMCA take down notice. When the fake DMCA notice arrived, the ABC already had in place a long-standing deal with YouTube to freely share its videos. In his hand-written letter, the boy claimed that he was acting on behalf of the "Australian Broddcasting [sic] Corperation [sic]", giving his own Hotmail address as his business contact and demanded that hundreds of videos from ABC's The Chaser's War on Everything television program be deleted from YouTube's servers. Despite the boy not having any affiliation with the ABC and the spelling errors on his hand-written form, YouTube did delete all of the videos at the boy's request and replaced each with a message stating "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Australian Broadcasting Corporation".

Philippine TV channel ABS-CBN also does not allow its videos to be on YouTube.

Use of acoustic fingerprints

On October 12, 2006, YouTube announced that because of recent agreements with high-profile content creators, they are now required to use antipiracy software, which uses an audio-signature technology that can detect a low-quality copy of licensed video. YouTube would have to substitute an approved version of any clip or remove the material immediately. Industry analysts speculated that removal of content with such a system might reduce overall user satisfaction.

On April 16, 2007, Google's CEO Eric E. Schmidt presented a keynote speech at the NAB Convention in Las Vegas. During the Q&A session, Schmidt announced that YouTube was close to enacting a content filtering system to remove infringing content from the service. The new system, called "Claim Your Content", will automatically identify copyrighted material for removal.

Google spokesperson Ricardo Reyes stated on June 13, 2007 that the company was seeking "a way to make video identification technology a reality" when they began to test the system in the next few days.

On October 15, 2007, Google announced the release of YouTube Video Identification, a tool that would go "above and beyond our legal responsibilities." In a blog posting on the release, YouTube product manager David King said YouTube Video Identification will help copyright holders identify their works on YouTube and choose what they want done with them.

Download tools

Freeware like FLV Downloader are available from websites like moyea.com and RealNetworks to download FLV files from YouTube without subscription. As of April 2008, this vulnerability remains exposed.

Violence

YouTube and similar sites were reportedly used by teenagers who record fights on mobile phones. In July 2007, such an incident happened at a school in Hayling Island, U.K. A video was uploaded at the end of 2006 of an arranged fight in Scarborough, England of two 16 year olds fighting, one of them then getting beaten up by at least 20 others. Additionally, in July 2007, a Briton urinated on a dying woman while a friend made a video of the incident. He reportedly yelled "This is YouTube material!"

Finland school shootings

YouTube appears to have removed 89 videos linked to an 18-year-old gunman who on November 7, 2007 killed at least eight people in Finland. Many of the videos featured Nazi imagery. One of the videos, uploaded days before the incident, called "Jokela high school massacre 11/7/2007", showed a picture of a building by a lake and two photos of a young man holding a gun.

Corruption

Criminal charges in Honduras

An unknown individual posted various recordings of high government officials in Honduras on YouTube, including of the President Mel Zelaya, implicating them in a corruption scandal concerning Hondutel, the state run telephone service. After Zelaya made a complaint to the police they launched an investigation to find who had made the recordings, which are considered espionage and a violation of Honduras' privacy laws, that included searching the mansion of the CEO of Hondutel, Marcelo Chimirri, an action condemned by Zelaya. On November 14 Chimirri appeared in court and was charged with various crimes related to the appearance of these clips on YouTube.

Animal abuse

YouTube has been criticized for hosting videos of real-life animal cruelty. One example is a video posted on Youtube in March 2008 by a US Marine Corps soldier showing him throwing a puppy off a cliff. Other Youtube videos show dog fighting and other animals forced to fight each other and one animal being fed to another, such as live food given to snakes. In spite of these videos being flagged as inappropriate by many users, YouTube has generally failed to take the same policing actions to remove them that they have with videos containing copyright infringement or sexual content.

Neo-Nazis on YouTube

On December 18, 2007, CNN reported about the prevalence of neo-Nazi propaganda and Holocaust denial videos on YouTube. Hundreds of Nazi- and SS-glorifying, Holocaust-denying, anti-Semitic and racist videos have been brought to the attention of both YouTube and its parent company Google Inc. by the German Zentralrat der Juden ("Central Council of Jews"), which did "not get any response". The first reports about the violation of YouTube's own rules surfaced in August 2007 after the German TV-magazine Report Mainz reported that even over a hundred complaints by the federal Jugendschutz.net watchdog to YouTube about videos forbidden by German law had not been answered and that the flagged content had not been removed by YouTube. Some of the flagged videos have been online for over a year. CNN contacted Google specifically about a 6 part video series of Holocaust Denial videos, which Google promised to "block immediately", but over five weeks later (and as of January 17, 2008) were still available.At some point between then and the 9th of February 2008, the video was taken down for a "terms of use violation".

Censorship by country

Since 2008, YouTube has started using geolocation to block certain countries from viewing certain videos. It is claimed that this was done due to licensing issues, as certain videos were not licensed for use outside a certain country. However, blocked videos can still be viewed by changing the URL from http://youtube.com/?v= to http://youtube.com/v/.

Other criticism

YouTube has also been criticized for various other reasons. For example, in early 2008, YouTube removed the link for sorting search results by view count, although the feature can still be accessed by entering the URL by changing the search_sort parameter to video_view_count (example: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Misplaced Pages&search_sort=video_view_count).

References

1. "YouTube allows media companies to block copyrighted content". Retrieved 2007-10-16.
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3. Guy, IPTV (2006-07-12). "TV Show Directory QuickSilverScreen.com Threatened by Fox". Web TV Wire. Retrieved 2006-10-12. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
4. Thor, Lord (2006-10-02). "DailyEpisodes closed down by Fox, for LINKING to TV show episodes!". Digg.com. Retrieved 2006-12-10. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
5. Sciretta, Peter (2006-07-26). "Columnia Pictures tells /Film to remove website link". SlashFilm. Retrieved 2006-10-12. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
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12. Reuters (2007-03-13). "Viacom in $1 bln copyright suit vs Google, YouTube". Reuters. Retrieved 2007-03-13. {{cite news}}: |author= has generic name (help); Check date values in: |date= (help)
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37. YouTube - Broadcast Yourself

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