Ben Reid
17 Jul 2006 17:08
Popular video streaming service YouTube was dealt a lawsuit on Friday in federal court for allowing its users to upload copyrighted video footage onto its website which included the beating of trucker Reginald Denny during the 1992 riots.
The owner and operator of Los Angeles News Service, Robert Tur, states in the lawsuit that within one week, one version of the Denny beating was viewed & downloaded 1,000 times via the site, which on Friday announced that its users are now viewing more than 100 million videos per day.
"The scope of the infringements is akin to a murky moving target, in that videos uploaded are not identified by copyright owner or registration number but rather by the uploader's idiosyncratic choice of descriptive terms to describe the content of the video — tags — making it extremely impractical to identify plaintiff's copyrighted works," Tur alleges in the lawsuit filed by attorney Francis Pizzulli of Santa Monica.
Tur is an award-winning journalist and helicopter pilot who has registered numerous copyrights for newsworthy footage. He also believes that YouTube is violating the U.S. Supreme Court's 2005 landmark decision in MGM v. Grokster.
"YouTube.com is not merely Grokster redux," Tur claims. "For unlike the peer-to-peer file sharing systems at issue in the Grokster case, YouTube provides the computer servers and 'world-class data centers' which allow users to upload video clips directly to YouTube's servers."
From there, they can be publicly viewed and copied via downloading at no charge, the lawsuit states.
Tur is seeking $150,000 for infringed works and a court order prohibiting YouTube from allowing his work to be uploaded and broadcast on the site.
YouTube could not be reached for comment.
Source:
Hollywood Reporter, ESQ