Youtube Gets Sued By English Premier League

Google’s lawyers filed the response to Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit earlier this week, but now they face yet another court battle. BBC is reporting that the English Premier League is to sue Youtube for alleged copyright infringement. According to BBC

The football organisation said YouTube had “knowingly misappropriated” its intellectual property by encouraging footage to be viewed on its site.

English Premier League’s commercial value has increased many fold in recent times and the combined TV, radio and internet rights for its games for the next three years fetched Pounds 2.7 billion.

The English Premier League has set up a website youtubeclassaction.com and are encouraging other parties, who have shared a similar faith at the hands of Youtube, to join hands in this legal battle. Bourne Co, a sheet music publisher has already signed up.

BBC however thinks that the lawsuits are a tactic to squeeze some dollars from the search giant and to get Google to quickly come up with some content licensing deal for the videos that it is displaying free of charge to its users. Youtube today announced revenue sharing with its popular users and have announced that a technology called “Claim Your Content” will soon be introduced to protect copyright infringement. Youtube needs to ship pre-roll advertising technology quickly in order to compensate the copyright holders and get out of this deep mess.