Viacom has stolen from people after ordering Take Down...

[Sionnach Glic]

Indeed. I'd quite like to see a reliable news source reporting it. I'm pretty certain that kids are treated differently in court than in reality. At least, they are over here, and I'm pretty sure the US operates in a similar way on this matter. I've done a brief Google search for the story, but I've not seen a reliable source that states Viacom is suing ten year olds.

And also, being young does not exempt you from the law. They uploaded a video, which means they must have seen the exact same "don't upload copyrighted material" as everyone else. Sure, maybe they didn't know any better, but ignorance is hardly a good excuse. And from what I've read, it seems to be more than just uploading clips from one or two episodes. The big 1 billion dollar lawsuit is over two YouTube users (who were not noted for being particularly young) uploading entire episodes of 24 which hadn't even been aired yet.

[Captain Seafort]

Indeed. I'd quite like to see a reliable news source reporting it. I'm pretty certain that kids are treated differently in court than in reality. At least, they are over here, and I'm pretty sure the US operates in a similar way on this matter.

I'm not sure what the exact limit is in the States, but over here they'd be criminally liable at ten. There were a pair of particularly obnoxiously ten year scum who were tried here about fifteen years ago who you might have heard of.

[Reliant121]

Never mind that year 10's shouldn't actually be part of youtube as far as I am aware. I think minimum age is 13.

[stitch626]

Legally, they can't accept (and hecne cannot be bound by) any terms of use until 13. For some its 18, depending on the preference of the company. Now their parents, well thats another story.

[Mikey]

He's not full of s**t.

How so? By saying that any uploaded material is protected by copyright law by virtue of the fact that it is uploaded, he's either: a) lying; or b) just wrong. Either option = "full of shit." Let's take a look at an example -

I possess a bootleg copy of ST XI on DVD (hypothetically, of course.) If this guy is correct, I could upload it to Youtube - as soon as I've done that, not only is my ownership of the DVD legitimate and no longer piracy, but at that point I own the copyright to the film ST XI. Surely even you dont' think that this scenario is accurate. Youtube, in fact, incurs more infringement of copyrights than Viacom by orders of magnitude.

Viacom is full of assholes

So is every collection of more than one person in the history of ever. Completely irrelevant.

suing kids who don't even know they break the copyright law.

So, ignorance of the law suddenly makes infringement of it disappear? Nope. If you didn't know about the legal requirement to remain at the scene of an accident, and then hit and killed someone and drove away, would that vehicular manslaughter still have occurred? The answer is yes. It's a very old maxim of law enforcement in the U.S. that "ignorance of the law is no excuse." Sure, some other settlement may have been preferable to us as observers, but Viacom was well within their rights to sue.

I mean kids as young as 10 years old.

I am not an attorney, but those suits were probably directed against the kids' legal guardians. As they should be. For a ten-year-old kid, it is the parents' responsibility to prevent them from performing criminal activities - which the kids did.

All because they upload one or two videos of one of their series up onto youtube.

Which is kind of the whole point of copyright law.

[Deepcrush]

Since you can't sue minors (by value of their state law such as in Maryland you can put a person on trial at 14 as an adult) and you have to direct your case against their legal guardians and then prove that the guardians failed in their duty well enough for a Grand Jury and Justice to approve then have another Jury agree that they should have to pay for the actions.

As far as the Federal level courts and Courts of Maryland are concerned. This is not only unlikely but rather impossible.

[Nickswitz]

Well, until I see it, I don't believe it.