In what must be one of the biggest mass removals of YouTube content, the video sharing site just pulled down 29,549 clips after a demand from a group of Japanese media companies. The group claimed that TV, music and movies had been uploaded without permission from the copyright holders. But as they usually do, YouTube reacted quickly to avoid a potential lawsuit.
The Tokyo-based Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers represents 23 Japanese media companies, and spokesperson Fumiyuki Asakura says they were found during "research" (a.k.a. playing around on YouTube) earlier this month - he also said that YouTube deleted the clips as soon as they were notified.
Sending a take-down notice is a much more reasonable approach than the one taken by Robert Tur - he's suing YouTube after his footage of the 1992 Los Angeles riots received a few thousand views, and YouTube claim that he didn't notify them of the problem before filing a lawsuit back in July. And as we learned yesterday, YouTube gave three of the major record labels a stake in the company to protect against crippling lawsuits like the two just filed by Universal music against Grouper and Bolt.com. The maximum fee for these cases is $150,000 per violation - for YouTube, that would add up to hundreds of millions, if not billions. It's obvious, then, why they were happy to give the record companies an equity stake worth up to $50 million.