The Bombay High Court
(HC) has recently ruled in favor of an Indian filmmaker named Sunil Darshan and
against Google and YouTube. With the recent decision awarding damages of Rs
50000 ($700) to the plaintiff, the eight-year-long Copyright Infringement battle
came to a temporary end. Although the compensation of this much amount may
appear as a joke for someone who has put up a legal battle against a tech giant
for several years, its value is symbolic and creates a judiciary precedent that
could lead to concerning troubles to YouTube.
The Bollywood
filmmaker, Sunil Darshan, filed the lawsuit accusing YouTube of violating his
copyrights back in the year 2011. He was fed up with YouTube’s ignorance to
remove videos of films that were his copyrighted work, and found the Content-ID
reporting system to be highly inadequate.
Besides this, Mr.
Darshan said that he intends to file another lawsuit to claim the complete
damages that he sustained over these years.
Intended to defend
itself, YouTube argued that it could not be held directly liable as it is the
users (not YouTube) who upload the content (video) on this platform merely
acting as an intermediary. The platform likewise claimed that the filmmaker
hadn’t used its DMCA takedown tools. So it never received any report from him.
Since this argument by
YouTube hasn’t been defined with certainty, the Indian Court ruled that YouTube
and Google should not wait for the reception of DMCA takedown notices from the
rights holders as they are aware that the content was protected under
copyright. The awareness is based on the aspect that the titles of the videos
infringing on copyrights were very revealing.
The Court also agreed
that the tech giant made a noticeable profit by keeping the
copyright-infringing content, indulging in unauthorized exploitation online.
Well, this is confirmed by the fact informing that the copyright-infringing
videos on this platform weren’t demonetized, but rather, the revenues obtained
were split amid YouTube and the uploaders.
As this means that all
the responsibilities to recognize the copyright-protected content or work and
then remove the same immediately is placed on Google and YouTube, these two
giants experienced a hard time to overturn this. Undoubtedly, that’s the case
with the existing EU (European) law, but to come across similar grounds in
India is something completely new for the tech giant. With all that said,
Google is almost surely going to submit an appeal to the verdict by HC as
otherwise, it would soon have to reform nearly everything related to the way it
operates. For more visit: https://www.kashishipr.com/
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