YouTube Down (1/5/07)

[milowent]

YouTube appears down this morning, and may have been for at least the last 8 hours.

Could it possibly be due to this? (Seems like it can't, because i don't see how a Brazil court's order would be enforced so quickly in the U.S.)

Court orders YouTube shut
Correspondents in Sao Paulo
JANUARY 05, 2007
(Retuers)

A BRAZILIAN court has ordered the popular video sharing service YouTube be shut down until it removes a celebrity sex video from its site.

Daniela Cicarelli, a model and ex-wife of football great Ronaldo, sued YouTube after a video of her apparently having sex in shallow water on a beach with her boyfriend was posted to the site.
For days it was the most viewed video in Brazil.

Cicarelli and boyfriend Tato Malzoni filed to force YouTube to take the video down and demanded $US116,000 ($148,000) in damages for each day the video remained up. Some copies of the video have been taken off the site but users reposted it.

The case over the video dragged on for several months before the celebrity couple filed a third suit in December requesting that YouTube be shut down as long as the video was available to users.

The court honoured that request on Wednesday, but legal experts said the ruling by the Brazilian court could be difficult to enforce in the United States, where YouTube is based.

Last year, a Brazilian court demanded YouTube's owner Google disclose data on local users of its social networking site Orkut who had pages with content supporting racism or child pornography.

Google took down some of those Orkut pages but has said that under US law it could not reveal user data.

Google was not immediately available for comment on Thursday.

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Oh, and you know what else, that hilarious BlendTec spoof was removed by last night due to copyright violations (or so youtube claims).

[Terryfic]

milowent said:

Oh, and you know what else, that hilarious BlendTec spoof was removed by last night due to copyright violations (or so youtube claims).

I thought you could legally make a parody of someone else's work. Plus the dudes in that video even took the time to point out that their blender wasn't a BlendTec blender.

[milowent]

terryfic said:

I thought you could legally make a parody of someone else's work. Plus the dudes in that video even took the time to point out that their blender wasn't a BlendTec blender.

parodies are ok, but my guess is that stealing the music outright was the hook. blendtec must not have liked it, because they could have let it slide.

[Icaterus]

Hmm interesting I just saw this on your blog milowent and I think you may have been the first person to report this ! I scanned over other blogs covering youtube stuff and they haven't mentioned this anywhere.

And youtube works fine for me right now. So did it just go down for a few hours or something? I wonder what took it out...

[milowent]

icaterus said:

And youtube works fine for me right now. So did it just go down for a few hours or something? I wonder what took it out...

i don't know. i did find something via google saying it had been down for 8 hours. i can't pull youtube up at the moment, but the outage may just be regional now.