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

Copyright

Content must be permitted by United States copyright law, the organization frequently removing upon request a vast quantity of infringing content. A decision in October 2007 allowed media companies to block their copyrighted video content loaded onto YouTube without seeking any prior permission.

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.

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, was occasionally used in bad faith. Since 2007, changes to the interface mean that only rights holders are able to directly report copyright violations.

Hollywood remains divided on YouTube. Ian Schafer, CEO of online advertising company Deep Focus has been quoted as saying "'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.).

In addition, YouTube has a rule prohibiting false claims of copyright from being filed; again, as with the rule aiming to prevent such videos from being uploaded, this too has been subject to abuse. For example, when American commentator and blogger Michelle Malkin uploaded commentary about Akon to YouTube, using footage from music videos and the Trinidad concert, Universal Music Group then forced its removal by issuing a DMCA takedown notice. The Electronic Frontier Foundation joined Malkin in contesting the removal as a misuse of copyright law, citing fair use. In May 2007, UMG rescinded its claim to the video, and the video returned to YouTube.

Problems with YouTube's copyright protection practices has caused some internet satirists who originally started on YouTube such as James Rolfe (The Angry Video Game Nerd) and Doug Walker (The Nostalgia Critic) to forgo YouTube altogether and form their own websites.

Examples of infringement complaints

On October 5, 2006, the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) finalized its 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, American comedian and actor 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 YouTube, or will sue.

Viacom and the British Broadcasting Corporation both demanded YouTube 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 its videos on the website without Viacom's permission. US District Court Judge Louis Stanton, on July 1, 2008 granted Viacom's request for data upon which YouTube viewers watch which videos on the website to support its case in a billion-dollar copyright lawsuit against Google. He debunked privacy concerns, directing Google to give Viacom viewing log-in ID / names of YouTube users and Internet protocol (IP) addresses (online identifier) and video clip details (totalling more than 12 terabytes of data). The judgement was criticized by Google and privacy advocates. Simon Davies said that the privacy of millions of YouTube users was threatened: "The chickens have come home to roost for Google." Stranton however, denied Viacom's pleas "to get its hands on secret source code used in YouTube video searches as well as for Internet searches, and to order Google to provide access to the videos YouTube users store in private YouTube files."

In May 2007, the English Premier League announced that it was suing YouTube for alleged copyright infringement, claiming that the website had "knowingly misappropriated" its intellectual property by encouraging Premier League soccer matches to be viewed on its site.

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". The boy was subsequently on The Chaser's War On Everything, when, upon closing, one of the Chasers said 'If you're quick, you can watch this episode on YouTube, unless some random Australian kid deletes them all'.

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

In August 2008, a U.S. District judge ruled that copyright holders cannot order a deletion of an online file without determining whether that posting reflected "fair use" of the copyrighted material. The case involved Stephanie Lenz, a writer and editor from Gallitzin, Pennsylvania, who made a home video of her 13-month-old son dancing to Prince's song Let's Go Crazy and posted the 29-second video on YouTube. Four months later, Universal Music, the owner of the copyright to the song, ordered YouTube to remove the video enforcing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Lenz notified YouTube immediately that her video was within the scope of fair use, and demanded that it be restored. YouTube complied after six weeks, as required by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, to see whether Universal planned to sue Lenz for infringement. Lenz then sued Universal Music in California for her legal costs, claiming the music company had acted in bad faith by ordering removal of a video that represented fair-use of the song.

Beginning in December 2008, various music labels (primarily Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group) have continuously removed YouTube videos featuring their songs in a long list of copyright complaints. This has led to a multitude of videos remonstrating against YouTube for not protecting its users from WMG and UMG, even if the music, while under fair use, is either an AMV or just a 10-20 second clip. This has caused a great many users to stop making videos altogether, due to their music tastes being arbitrarily disallowed. On 30 September, YouTube announced on their blog that the rights to post WMG music had returned.

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.

In January 2009, YouTube's Video ID system was used by Warner Music Group to aid in automatically taking down or muting the audio of a mass amount of infringing and non-infringing videos. This resulted in a large amount of "Fair Use" videos suffering the consequences from the mass takedowns. According to YouTomb, (a MIT free culture project) due to Video ID aiding in the takedowns, January 2009 had seen double the amount of takedowns compared to all of the last year alone. On September 21, 2009, CNET reported that Warner Music Group had possibly struck a new deal with YouTube and WMG videos may start appearing back on YouTube within weeks, however some videos were still either muted by WMG, or cannot be viewed globally. It was confirmed on Warner Music Group News and the YouTube Blog on September 29, 2009 that YouTube and Warner Music Group were in a multi-year deal with each other.

Violence

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YouTube has been criticized for fostering the spread of images of sex and violence on the Internet.

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 man apparently urinated on a dying woman while a friend made a video of the incident. He reportedly yelled "THIS IS YOUTUBE MATERIAL!" On March 30, 2008, a group of six girls and two boys beat up a 16-year-old and planned to post the video on YouTube.

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 a high school in Jokela, 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.

The Kauhajoki school shooting was a school shooting that occurred on 23 September 2008, in Kauhajoki, a city in Western Finland. In the weeks leading up to the incident, the gunman had posted several videos on YouTube, clearly infuenced by the Jokela school shootings the previous year.

Corruption

Criminal charges in Honduras

In November 2007, 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.

Censorship

YouTube has been criticized for censorship from political reasons.

YouTube blocked the account of Wael Abbas, an activist who posted videos of police brutality, voting irregularities and anti-government demonstrations. His account was subsequently restored.

YouTube also removed a video produced by the American Life League which is critical of Planned Parenthood. It has since been restored.

On February 22, 2008, Pakistan Telecommunications attempted to block regional access to YouTube following a government order. The attempt subsequently caused a worldwide YouTube blackout that took 2 hours to correct. Four days later, Pakistan Telecom lifted the ban after YouTube removed religiously controversial comments made by Dutch member of parliament Geert Wilders concerning Islam.

During the December 2008 Gaza Strip airstrikes, YouTube removed videos of air strikes against the Palestinian militant group Hamas that were posted by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

Several authors criticized YouTube for its agreement with Anti-Defamation League, the Zionist advocacy group.

Pat Condell's video "Welcome to Saudi Britain" was removed by YouTube early in October 2008, but reinstated shortly after. In the video Condell criticises Britain's sanctioning of a Sharia court, and refers to the entire country of Saudi Arabia as mentally ill for its abuse of women. A YouTube spokesman said "YouTube has clear policies that prohibit inappropriate content on the site, such as pornography, gratuitous violence or hate speech...If users repeatedly break these rules we disable their accounts." The National Secular Society were among the complainants to YouTube."

Animal abuse

YouTube has been criticized by animal welfare groups for hosting videos of animal cruelty, including dog fighting, live animals being fed to predators, hunting, and other apparent abuses.

Neo-Nazis and genocide denial

On December 18, 2007, the news network CNN reported about the abundance 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 Jewish group Zentralrat der Juden (tr. "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 six-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 January 17 and February 9, 2008, the video was taken down for a "terms of use violation".

Abusive users

YouTube has been criticised for not enforcing strict rules on the content of videos and comments on videos that may be deemed offensive. This has allowed some users to post questionable comments on videos and profiles of other users. The posting of potentially offensive videos and comments has been reported in the Daily Mirror, relating to comments on videos about the Munich Air Disaster, Hillsborough Disaster and the Soham Murders. In addition to this a growing problem arises from the absence of comment screening and the freedom of anonymity for Youtube users which creates a platform for some users to set up accounts specifically for the purpose of posting sick jokes on memorial videos and the inability for such comments to be promptly deleted.

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