[NetBehaviour] VW 'Nazi' Subpoena Points Up YouTube Privacy Risks.

marc garrett marc.garrett at furtherfield.org
Mon Sep 17 11:16:26 CEST 2007


VW 'Nazi' Subpoena Points Up YouTube Privacy Risks.

A legal spat between YouTube and Volkswagen is throwing light on the 
increasing copyright surveillance of social networking sites.

Volkswagen has filed a subpoena seeking the identity of a YouTube user 
who posted a Nazi-themed parody of a recent VW Golf commercial. 
Volkswagen's move underscores the privacy risks to a blossoming 
community of users on sites like YouTube and Yahoo Video, and 
social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Copyright holders and their agents have long been monitoring activity on 
file-sharing networks such as BitTorrent and Gnutella. Now they're 
turning their attention to the social networks.

"The social networking sites have definitely become a new focal point," 
said Evan Cox, a San Francisco copyright attorney who, with his 
colleagues, issue thousands of takedown notices a year. "As a 
consequence, they've gotten more focus from copyright owners."

Volkswagen alleges the video violates its copyrights, according to San 
Francisco federal court documents. The doctored video has been removed 
from YouTube and is no longer available. The VW subpoena is the first 
legal step toward what could grow into a copyright infringement lawsuit. 
Volkswagen did not reply to several messages seeking comment.

more...
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/news/2007/09/vw_parody_ad



More information about the NetBehaviour mailing list