A U.S. judge on Wednesday denied class-action status to copyright owners suing Google Inc over the use of material posted on YouTube without their permission.

U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton in Manhattan denied a motion to certify a worldwide class of copyright owners in a long-running lawsuit over videos and music posted to the popular website.

“The suggestion that a class action of these dimensions can be managed with judicial resourcefulness is flattering, but unrealistic,” Stanton wrote.

» via Yahoo! News

Media giant Viacom lost yet another legal salvo today toward getting as much as $1 billion from Google for allegedly violating music and video copyrights on the YouTube video service.

U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton of New York ruled on the case again after a federal appeals court, largely siding with YouTube last year, asked him to consider a narrow issue of whether YouTube was aware of the rampant infringement of Viacom’s content taking place on YouTube before it adopted its copyright filters in 2007.

Over all, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had largely upheld Stanton’s 2010 decision throwing out the case on the grounds that YouTube, like other online companies, was not liable for infringement committed by its users.

In the end, Stanton concluded today that Viacom does not have “the kind of evidence that would allow a clip-by-clip assessment of actual knowledge.”

» via Wired

Google-owned YouTube said Wednesday it is altering its algorithms to reduce invalid copyright infringement claims on its video-sharing site and will begin manually reviewing some claims instead of the system automatically blocking disputed footage.

The development comes a month after First Lady Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention was wrongly flagged by algorithms just after it aired. YouTube, the official streaming partner of the Democratic National Convention, automatically put a copyright blocking message on the livestream video of the event shortly after it ended.

» via Wired

Iran has lifted restrictions imposed a week ago on the secure version of the Google email service and search engine.

Google’s video-sharing site, YouTube, which has been blocked in Iran since 2009, remains unavailable.

Iran’s telecommunications ministry committee said of the ban: “We wanted to block YouTube, and Gmail was also blocked, which was involuntary.”

“We do not yet have enough technical know-how to differentiate between these two services,” Mohammad Reza Miri said.

» via BBC

A California actress who appeared in the infamous “Innocence of Muslims” flick on YouTube is again asking a federal court to remove the anti-Islam footage that has spawned deadly protests and sparked a U.S backlash in the Middle East.

Actress Cindy Lee Garcia is now claiming a copyright interest in the film, and says that Google ignored five DMCA takedown notices served on YouTube seeking removal of the film.

The latest development comes days after a Los Angeles County judge refused to take down the film in a previous suit. Garcia argued she was fired from her job, received death threats and was tricked into starring in the “hateful anti-Islamic production.”

» via Wired

Authorities arrested Google’s top executive in Brazil Wednesday after officials said he violated the South American country’s election law when he didn’t take down online videos that allegedly slandered a political candidate.

An arrest warrant in the southwest state of Mato Grosso do Sul accuses Fabio Jose Silva Coelho, Google’s president in Brazil, of “disobedience” for not removing YouTube videos about a local mayoral candidate.

Federal police arrested Coelho Wednesday, but described the alleged crime as a “minor offense” and said he would be released on his own recognizance after signing a commitment paper to appear in court.

» via CNN

A California judge refused Thursday to order YouTube to remove controversial footage from “Innocence of Muslims,” the inflammatory film that sparked a U.S. backlash in the Middle East.

A woman who starred in the film, Cindy Lee Garcia, asked a Los Angeles County judge to take down the film because she said she was fired from her job, received death threats and was tricked into starring in the “hateful anti-Islamic production.” The film has possibly led to the killing of J. Chrisopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya and about two dozen others the past week.

» via Wired

YouTube users now watch more than four billion hours of video through the site each month. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s 456,000 years of cat videos, sports highlights, TED Talks and other content per month. Or, the equivalent of watching the original Nyan Cat video about 66 billion times.

» via Yahoo! News

A French court on Tuesday dismissed a copyright lawsuit against Google’s online video-sharing platform, YouTube, in a case that has parallels with the long-running struggle between YouTube and Viacom in the United States.

The Tribunal de Grande Instance declared that YouTube, which lets people post videos to the site, had made sufficiently adequate efforts to remove programs like “Heroes” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” for which TF1, the biggest television company in France, owned French broadcasting rights.

TF1 had sought €141 million, or $176 million, in damages. Instead, it was ordered to pay €80,000 for Google’s legal expenses.

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