One of India's biggest record and movie companies, Mumbai-based Super Cassettes Industries Ltd, has told local media that it has obtained a court order that prohibits YouTube India from carrying any of its music or videos. The order follows legal action taken by SCIL against YouTube and its parent Google earlier in the year.
SCIL said in a statement this weekend: "The business model of YouTube allows, encourages and profits from use of copyrighted work uploaded on the website without obtaining any license or permission from the rightful copyright owners and without paying them any royalty".
The company's MD, Bhushan Kumar, added: "There are websites that encourage unlicensed sharing and distribution of copyright content, which is a new form of piracy in the digital medium. Copyright is the engine of creative output of popular content. We have to ensure that the incentive to create and distribute popular content is protected from these large corporations, which are trying to profit by destroying the value of the hard work of thousands of artists, for whom their creative output is perhaps their only source of livelihood".
YouTube and Google India are yet to comment on the court order, though at the time of SCIL's original litigation they stressed their standard line on this issue - that their terms and conditions clearly tell users not to upload copyright content, and that they will always remove content if instructed to do so by copyright owners - something which, they claim, brings them inline with copyright laws. It is unclear if SCIL's court order will force YouTube to be more proactive in stopping the Mumbai firm's content from being uploaded, and if so how the web firm will go about stopping the uploads.
As previously reported, YouTube has avoided legal action from the major record companies by persuading them to licence their content in return for a cut of advertising sales. But there has been litigation from music publishers in Japan, and from the TV and movie industries in the US, most notably from MTV owner Viacom - that could prove to be a landmark case regarding the legalities of video sharing websites if and when it gets to court.