YouTube is not liable for the content that its users upload and has no obligation to monitor, the Spanish court ruled yesterday in a case brought forward by broadcaster Telecino, thereby following the verdicts of many other European and U.S. courts. Detecting infringing copyright protected works is a task of the rights holder, the court finds. YouTube is only obliged to remove infringing content when notified of it's occurrence.

"If Internet sites had to screen all videos, photos and text before allowing them on a website, many popular sites—not just YouTube, but Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and others—would grind to a halt," said YouTube to ArsTechnica yesterday, adding that it provides a content filtering service called 'Content ID' that helps companies alleviate the burdening of continuous monitoring." 

That makes a proper functioning of the NTD regime and access to YouTube Content ID program essential. Yet not everyone agrees that that is currently the case. Easycom, representative of a number of Albanian artists found that YouTube's NTD procedure isn't working properly. Many right holders requesting an NTD are still forced to start legal proceedings against the unidentifyable YouTube user - an impossible task - while in the meantime the presumably infringing content stays online.

ArsTechnica reports that Viacom, that lost a similar lawsuit from YouTube earlier, accused YouTube of abusing its Content ID program, only providing access to companies willing to make a deal with YouTube. According to ArsTechnica, this wouldn't be the case anymore.

Again this doesn't seem to be the case, at least from Easycom's experience. Despite requests YouTube refused to add the Albanian artists works to the Content ID database. That is, until they jointly started legal proceedings.

Source: ArsTechnica