Spain's Telecinco wins lawsuit against YouTube
Agence France-Presse
First Posted 07:44:00 07/24/2008
MADRID -- Spanish private television channel Telecinco said Wednesday it had won a lawsuit it filed against YouTube accusing the world's top video-sharing site of violating its intellectual property rights.
Telecinco, controlled by Italian broadcaster Mediaset, which is owned by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, said in a statement that Madrid's commercial court had ordered YouTube to stop broadcasting images belonging to the channel.
The judge ordered "the discontinuation of the use of broadcasts and audiovisual recordings belonging to Telecinco on the Internet site operated by YouTube unless explicitly authorized in writing by Telecinco," the statement said.
In announcing the lawsuit on June 19, Telecinco charged that YouTube had refused to adopt "effective measures" to prevent clips of its programming from appearing on its site.
"YouTube is exploiting content that belongs solely and exclusively to Telecinco," the television channel's secretary general, Mario Rodriguez, said last month.
YouTube was hurting Telecinco by airing episodes of its television shows before the channel broadcast them in Spain, he added.
Last year media giant Viacom slapped YouTube and its parent company Google with a lawsuit in a New York court for copyright infringement that claims $1 billion (€645 billion) in damages.
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