Los Angeles News Service, an L.A.-based video news service, has sued YouTube, Inc., for allowing its users to upload copyrighted video footage onto its website. The company is particularly miffed about a video showing the beating of trucker Reginald Denny during the 1992 L.A. riots, according to reports. The news service’s owner, Rogert Tur, said his site owned the video, which was uploaded to YouTube and viewed 1,000 times, which isn’t a large number; popular YouTube videos have view-counts in the hundreds of thousands.
Tur has argued that “the scope of the infringements is akin to a murky moving target,” because videos uploaded to the site are not identified by the individual who owns the copyright, but are instead given a description by the user who uploads the clip. Tur believes this makes it difficult to correctly identify the original owner’s work. Furthermore, he asserts, YouTube is acting illegally as users are allowed to upload video clips directly to YouTube’s servers.
Talk: Could this be the first salvo against video sharing sites like YouTube? COMMENT
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