YouTube entered a series of commercial partnerships in Japan yesterday, where the video-sharing Web site is trying to overcome fierce criticism over copyright protection.
US Internet giant Google, which owns YouTube, said it was tying up with six Japanese firms including satellite broadcaster Sky PerfecTV and quickly growing social networking service Mixi, which will both link content to YouTube.
Casio Computer Co also formed a partnership with the rising but controversial Internet site, offering digital cameras designed to upload videos specifically on YouTube.
"After the United States, Japan is the most popular country for YouTube," Google vice president David Eun told a news conference in Tokyo. "We really believe that if we can stay true to what users want and we can be good partners, then the business will come."
But YouTube has been in a long feud with Japanese content providers over the downloading of copyrighted materials through the Web site.
Earlier this year the company agreed to post a warning on its Web site in Japanese against copyright infringements.
Google, which bought YouTube last year in a US$1.65 billion deal, is planning new "fingerprinting" tools later this year to identify copyright-protected contents on YouTube.
But Japan's copyright holders, who held the second round of negotiations with Google on Tuesday, urged YouTube to take more thorough and immediate measures.
Twenty-four content owners, mainly traditional broadcasters, "strongly urged the company to swiftly take measures to prevent rights violations out of its own responsibility until the new prevention system is introduced," a statement said after the talks.
An official of the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers said copyright holders were also not content with the new system.
"We believe the technology Google plans to introduce will not be good enough," he said.
Eun admitted there will be no "perfect, 100 percent solution" to weed out illegally copied and uploaded clips from all the videos inundating YouTube.
"As you all know, anytime a technology comes along it hits a sort of arms race because you have people who want to try to crack the technologies," he said. "What we have to do is build scalable, efficient, automated solutions that don't depend on individual humans looking at video."
CHIP WAR: Tariffs on Taiwanese chips would prompt companies to move their factories, but not necessarily to the US, unleashing a ‘global cross-sector tariff war’ US President Donald Trump would “shoot himself in the foot” if he follows through on his recent pledge to impose higher tariffs on Taiwanese and other foreign semiconductors entering the US, analysts said. Trump’s plans to raise tariffs on chips manufactured in Taiwan to as high as 100 percent would backfire, macroeconomist Henry Wu (吳嘉隆) said. He would “shoot himself in the foot,” Wu said on Saturday, as such economic measures would lead Taiwanese chip suppliers to pass on additional costs to their US clients and consumers, and ultimately cause another wave of inflation. Trump has claimed that Taiwan took up to
A start-up in Mexico is trying to help get a handle on one coastal city’s plastic waste problem by converting it into gasoline, diesel and other fuels. With less than 10 percent of the world’s plastics being recycled, Petgas’ idea is that rather than letting discarded plastic become waste, it can become productive again as fuel. Petgas developed a machine in the port city of Boca del Rio that uses pyrolysis, a thermodynamic process that heats plastics in the absence of oxygen, breaking it down to produce gasoline, diesel, kerosene, paraffin and coke. Petgas chief technology officer Carlos Parraguirre Diaz said that in
SUPPORT: The government said it would help firms deal with supply disruptions, after Trump signed orders imposing tariffs of 25 percent on imports from Canada and Mexico The government pledged to help companies with operations in Mexico, such as iPhone assembler Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), shift production lines and investment if needed to deal with higher US tariffs. The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday announced measures to help local firms cope with the US tariff increases on Canada, Mexico, China and other potential areas. The ministry said that it would establish an investment and trade service center in the US to help Taiwanese firms assess the investment environment in different US states, plan supply chain relocation strategies and
Japan intends to closely monitor the impact on its currency of US President Donald Trump’s new tariffs and is worried about the international fallout from the trade imposts, Japanese Minister of Finance Katsunobu Kato said. “We need to carefully see how the exchange rate and other factors will be affected and what form US monetary policy will take in the future,” Kato said yesterday in an interview with Fuji Television. Japan is very concerned about how the tariffs might impact the global economy, he added. Kato spoke as nations and firms brace for potential repercussions after Trump unleashed the first salvo of