Up until recently, it seemed that media companies would go after YouTube when copyrighted content was uploaded to the site. Now, it seems some content owners are pursuing the uploaders themselves.
Over the weekend, The Premier League, a British soccer league, got riled over the unauthorized use of copyrighted content - but this time they went after the user who uploaded the content (101greatgoals.blogspot.com), not YouTube themselves. In some ways, this makes sense: it's the uploader who's infringing, not Google-YouTube. YouTube, for their part, also seemed to disable the videos on the blog, but other Premiership goals continue to appear on YouTube itself. Admittedly it would make more sense in the long term to embrace the promotion of the sport and seek revenue sharing deals with video-sharing sites, but contracts with broadcast TV stations probably prevent them from doing that right away.
A far more worrying story turned up on MarketWatch on Friday: it has emerged that in May, a federal judge in San Francisco issued a subpoena to YouTube on behalf of Paramount Pictures. YouTube then handed over data about the user in question, who was accused of uploading dialog from the movie "Twin Towers". On June 16th, YouTube user Chris Moukarbel was sued for copyright infringement in a federal court in Washington. Legal experts responded by saying that YouTube had given in too easily, and they should have resisted the challenge from Paramount. It's the first incident we know of where YouTube actually presented user data to the authorities.