YouTube revisited

Just a short post this time. It surprised me how quickly related issues came up in the past two weeks. I wondered about the legal and privacy issues that might be involed here, and indeed there have been some recent cases in which YouTube had to remove certain video files. The embedded video object in my posting of Jan 3, has now been removed from YouTube. The first message says: 'this video is no longer available'. When you click trough to YouTube you'll see a text banner saying 'This video has been removed due to terms of use violation'. A second case refers to the famous soccer player Ronaldo (Real Madrid) who wanted a video to be removed because of violation of his privacy. Although YouTube tried to refer to their terms of use in which solely the end-user has responsibility for checking all legal and privacy issues that might be involved, this did not hold in court. The provider of the infrastructure (YouTube in this case) has at least a shared responsibility and should pro-actively check on the video materials that are published. The Ronaldo video had to be removed at once. If not, they have to pay a considerable amount of money for each day the video would still be available from YouTube. Interesting case, because I think it's difficult to prevent that another user will upload the video again.