On Friday, the Football Association Premier League, England’s most prestigious soccer organization, filed suit in New York against the massively popular video-sharing site, accusing it of enabling users to violate copyright law. On the same day, in California, NBC Universal and Viacom filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of journalist Bob Tur, who in a lawsuit filed last summer accused YouTube of infringing on his copyrighted material by posting video he shot during the 1992 Los Angeles riots without his permission.
And widespread reports out of Thailand indicate that the government there is considering suing YouTube for displaying a video that it claims is offensive to the nation’s monarch. But not even an angry king poses as much of a threat to YouTube as repeated accusations that the Web’s largest video site enables the theft of intellectual property, analysts say.
As of March, only Tur and media conglomerate Viacom had filed copyright infringement claims against the video powerhouse, which Google acquired last October for $1.65 billion. Now, YouTube is facing a third complaint (from the British soccer league), and NBC Universal–which is among those that have inked content-sharing agreements with YouTube–is making its own noise in the background.
Source: News.com