A Brazilian judge has ordered YouTube to find a way to stop Brazilians from viewing steamy footage of supermodel Daniela Cicarelli and her boyfriend on the highly popular video-sharing Web site, court officials said.
YouTube was first ordered in September to remove video showing Cicarelli and Brazilian banker Renato Malzoni in intimate scenes along a beach near the Spanish city of Cadiz.
But the clip still appears periodically on YouTube, prompting the expanded order from Sao Paulo state Supreme Court Justice Enio Santarelli Zuliani on Tuesday, the court's press office said in a statement on Thursday.
Two Brazilian sites that ran the video of Cicarelli and Malzoni complied with the original order, the statement said.
Cicarelli is one of Brazil's best-known models. She hosts a show on Brazilian MTV and was previously engaged to Brazilian soccer great Ronaldo, who plays for the famed Real Madrid team of Spain.
The judge said YouTube must find a way to use filters so the clip stops popping up in Brazil on the Web site owned by Google Inc. Lawyer Rubens Decousseau Tilkian, who represents Cicarelli's boyfriend, said YouTube had not gone far enough to prevent access to the clip because people succeeded in posting it using different names for the video.
"The Internet is democratic and has to be defended, but this struggle is to have some level of control to avoid the violations of people's fundamental rights, like privacy and intimacy," Tilkian said in a phone interview.
YouTube spokeswoman Jennifer Nielsen declined comment on the decision.
Links to the video appeared on YouTube on Thursday, but efforts to access them from Brazil and the US produced the message: "This video has been removed due to terms of use violation."
Though Zuliani is a judge in Brazil's most populous state of Sao Paulo, where Internet use is heaviest, he had the power to issue an order affecting all of Brazil, the court press office said.
The case now goes automatically to a three-member panel of judges who will decide whether to make the order permanent and whether to fine YouTube as much as US$119,000 for each day that the video was viewable, Tilkian said.
The lawyer represented both Cicarelli and Malzoni in the first case, when they won the order to have the links taken down.
Malzoni decided to go forward with the second case seeking to ban YouTube in Brazil after the video kept reappearing, Tilkian said.
"The problem is that the system is failing," Tilkian said.
"Our objective is simply to get this video off-line," he said.
It's not YouTube's first brush with litigation, although disputes have often been over copyright.
In July, independent news reporter Robert Tur sued YouTube in the US District Court in Los Angeles, saying that footage he had taken was posted and circulated without his permission.
When it bought YouTube last year, Google set aside shares now worth about US$220 million as a financial cushion to cover losses or possible legal bills for the frequent copyright violations on the video sharing Web Site.
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