YouTube has a loophole in which can be exploited by users. The flaw allows them to upload pirated contents as well as adult-related materials to the streaming portal entirely free of charge.
While those websites are benefiting from the free storage, and bandwidth all billed to Google, copyright holders aren't pleased. A German media outfit reportedly sent requests to Google hoping to take down the files, but without success.
Tens of thousands of infringed videos from many large websites were publicly available on YouTube.
Since the files remain online and requests to Google to remove the files have gone unanswered, the lawyers of the media company have applied for an injunction against Google at a local court.
YouTube has a lot of videos that are hidden beneath the surface. The pirates and adult streaming websites essentially took advantage of YouTube's option to upload contents without sharing them publicly. This effectively allowed them to embed video on their website and bypass Google's Content-ID takedown system.
What this means, the contents remain on YouTube but unlisted.
The uploaders admit that although the contents will eventually be removed by Google, but it does take significantly longer than usual to process the takedown requests. This is because URLs of the videos are harder to identify, and automated takedown tools can't spot them easily.
This has made some companies to say that YouTube might have basically become "one of the world's largest databases of copyright infringing material" on the web.
