Google’s online video platform YouTube may have to fork out hefty royalties after a German court has ruled that YouTube must install filters to check users from uploading music videos whose rights are owned by a music-royalties collecting body, GEMA.
A court in Hamburg ruled that in favor of German music royalty collecting society GEMA that argued Google doesn’t do enough to monitor copyrighted content on YouTube.
The presiding judge Heiner Steeneck said Google must implement features to detect future violations if a rights holder alerts the company.
German royalties collections body GEMA expects that after the German court ruling last week could result in Google-owned YouTube to enter into discussions with it over the copyrighted content.
The court ruled last week that YouTube must install filters to prevent users from uploading copyrighted music clips without permission, forcing it to take down seven videos, out of the 12 for which GEMA has asserted copyright protection.
GEMA head Harald Heker was reported as saying by Reuters to German magazine Spiegel we hope that YouTube will now negotiate on a serious basis with us.
"We don’t want to take them to court, we want a contract," Heker told.
"Our last offer was already a big step forward. Other providers find our tariff acceptable."
GEMA hopes to receive a share of YouTube’s advertising revenues in copyright fees as YouTube failed to settle the copyright controversy after an earlier deal between the two firms expired in 2009.
The court ruling is considered to make YouTube and similar online music and video services face a hefty royalties bill, though YouTube said it gives the technical framework to upload content and was not monitoring them for copyright violations.
YouTube revealed in a blog post earlier that 60 hours of video is uploaded per minute and over 4 billion videos are viewed a day.
YouTube has maintained that it has no legal responsibility for the uploaded content – saying it checks and sometimes blocks content when users alert about about violations of law.
