A German court has ruled that the search giant has to implement filters on its popular YouTube service, by keeping an eye on the local users from uploading music and videos that are protected by a German music royalty agency (GEMA). The agency argued in the court that YouTube had not done enough to protect copyrighted clips being posted. The interesting here is that Google argued that it bears no “legal responsibility” for the content means anyone can put anything – anyone copyrighted content. Also, the company said it is having systems in place to check and remove content when videos infringe copyrights.
If the ruling is upheld, Google could be forced to pay for each video that infringes on German artists, which could be a substantial amount for the company given that 60 hours of video is uploaded per minute worldwide. GEMA, which represents over 60,000 German writers and musicians, originally took action against Google over twelve music videos that were uploaded to YouTube. The company was accused of not paying royalties to the original artists.
