Heavyweights Viacom and NBC have joined in to support Robert Tur’s lawsuit against Youtube.

In a friends-of-the-court brief filed Friday, Viacom and NBC Universal asked a U.S. District Court judge in Los Angeles to deny a motion filed by Google to dismiss Tur’s suit.

Tur filed a copyright infringement suit against Youtube last year prior to their acquisition by Google. Google have now filed a motion to dismiss his case as Youtube is protected under the safe harbour provision.

Viacom and NBC are concerned that the judge’s decision in Tur’s case will have an impact on their own lawsuit against Youtube. In their legal brief they try to emphasise differences between Tur’s case and their own.

(Viacom and NBC Universal) request that the court consider that its works are more popular, more commercial, and far more numerous than Tur’s,” wrote Frackman, of the law firm Mitchell, Silberberg & Knupp. “They comprise a significant portion of the infringing works contained on YouTube, viewed billions of times, and are among the most-viewed and highest-rated videos on YouTube.

Roughly translated they are saying ‘we have more copyrighted material than Tur and our copyrighted material is viewed more often and makes more money than his, so his case has no bearing on ours’

What double talk from Viacom and NBC, they’ll support Tur but if he loses then they are nothing to do with him. Personally I think they’re scared.

Source: ZDNet

You would think Youtube would be hanging on to its money instead of dishing it out to contributors. Especially as they are now being sued by the English Premier League for hosting videos of soccer games. The lawsuit says

Defendants, which own and operate the Web site YouTube.com, have knowingly misappropriated and exploited this valuable property for their own gain without payment or license to the owners of the intellectual property

All pretty standard rhetoric but how long can Google handle these lawsuits against Youtube, they seem to be almost a weekly occurrence. The standard Youtube response is that they are not responsible for what is uploaded by the site’s users, but more of these lawsuits seem to be focusing on Youtube encouraging users to post copyrighted material.

Youtube do have a copyright notice slapped on their video upload page, but you do wonder if Google’s legal department’s patience is wearing a bit thin.

Anyway we checked out Youtube and searched for ‘English premier league’ and much to my disappointment we couldn’t find downloads of this weekend’s footy games, just highlights of recent games. Nothing even worth posting here.

Are the English Premier League on a fruitless crusade, or should Youtube be shut down forever, let us know your thoughts.

Source: BBC

After similar events in Turkey. This seems to keep happening to YouTube due to copyright scandals and calumniator content. Until Google bought it, this was not that much of a big deal but since then all who have something to gain from it can hit Google long and hard on the Youtube subject.

The ban was now established in Thailand, it seems YouTube editors refused to remove some offensive content, even though authorities from Thailand requested it in numerous occasions. As you well know this is not a first, YouTube got banned in the past in countries like Brasil and in state schools in Australia, for similar causes.

And legal matters are not the least of YouTube’s concerns now. Derived from all this copyright problems the video service from Google is facing a great deal of other sites of the kind offer video material that YouTube can’t show anymore. Here are a few examples AllSP or TV links or many more of the same sort that steal a increasing share of YouTube’s visitors.

YouTube is certainly traveling in some black waters, will be Google able to pull it off?

After the recent victory of YouTube in Turkey, where the online video site was banned two days ago, new problems seem to come upon Google’s service. Since today the ban in Turkey was removed but numerous users from Thailand reported that the YouTube site cannot be accessed.

Surfers in Thailand say they are redirected to the Ministry of Communication and Technology (MICT) site when they want to access YouTube. MICT is the Internet censorship organism in Thailand, but until no there was now official reason for the ban.

I don’t necessarily support YouTube but I think people have the right to be free to watch whatever they want so I hope problems like this will be passed one way or the other.

Yesterday, this YouTube vid got dugg by over 5000 users, though there was nothing new about it. I have seen it for the first time a long time ago, and it is on YouTube for 7 months now. After seeing it for the first time, I started wondering how practical could such a desktop environment be. Except for the people that usualy have their desktop full of icons, there’s no practical need for it.

This video found on NetBoy’s page caught my attention: here’s something that’s not spreaded and popular as it should be - XGL. Now that’s something I can use and find is useful: dividing your applications on a number of desktops and sorting them by type or by usage or by anything you may want. The best thing about it is that it’s free.

For all I care, I would love the first 30 minutes of play; I wouldn’t use all the features or at least most of them on a day-to-day basis, but it would definitely ease my works more than BumpTop. Real life doesn’t always apply to desktops.