alafista.com

A coalition of Japanese television, music and film companies slammed YouTube on Thursday, saying the online video sharing service was not doing enough.

Apparently they are very unhappy over Youtube lackluster efforts of ridding the site of cartoons and other clips that infringe copyright. The coalition has demanded that all copyrighted material be removed immediately. The group also expressed skepticism over an automatic video recognition and purging system being developed by YouTube parent Google Inc., questioning the reliability of the technology and saying it was taking too long for the system to kick in.

I’m sure everyone has seen various Japanese music videos, television programs and even anime series on Youtub. Its no surprise that the coalition are starting to take action now. Even I myself have uploaded the smapxsmap video of cyril just yesterday. *gasp*

YouTube has been immensely popular in Japan, trumping rival Japanese video sharing sites. It launched a Japanese language version of the site in June in a bid to win further viewers — and to post clear warnings against uploading copyrighted materials in Japanese. YouTube has said it cooperates with holders of copyrights and immediately complies with requests to have unauthorized material removed from the site. In October, the site deleted nearly 30,000 files after the Japanese group complained of copyright infringement.

Programmers at Google are also rushing to develop a video recognition system that will allow copyright holders to provide digital fingerprints of video, enabling the site to prevent anyone trying to share copyrighted content. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company has promised to launch the technology by the end of the year. That’s too long to wait, coalition officials said Thursday.

I wonder whether they will also start targeting the other video streaming websites like Stage 6, Veoh and CrunchyRoll.