Los Angeles News Service sues YouTube.com for copyright infringement

Los Angeles News Service sues YouTube.com for copyright infringement

Los Angeles News Service is a Los Angeles based video news service and they have sued the popular online video sharing website YouTube.com.

They are claiming that the website enables the regular web users to upload copyrighted video footage onto the popular Web site.

They have particularly referred to the beating of trucker Reginald Denny during the 1992 riots.

Los Angeles News Service owner and operator, Robert Tur further asserted the fact that a video owned by them was uploaded to the service and was viewed and downloaded 1,000 times via the YouTube.com service.

Tur further added: “The scope of the infringements is akin to a murky moving target, in that videos uploaded are not identified by copyright owner or registration number but rather by the uploader’s idiosyncratic choice of descriptive terms to describe the content of the video — tags — making it extremely impractical to identify plaintiff’s copyrighted works.”

He also said that the web service is violating the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in MGM v. Grokster. Tur said: “YouTube.com is not merely Grokster redux. For unlike the peer-to-peer file sharing systems at issue in the Grokster case, YouTube provides the computer servers and ‘world-class data centers’ which allow users to upload video clips directly to YouTube’s servers.”