New Delhi, Nov 13: The Delhi High Court has in an interim order, restrained YouTube, an audio-video sharing website owned by Google Inc, from infringing in the exclusive copyright works of the well known T-Series label.

The High Court was moved against YouTube and its parent company Google Inc. on account of rank infringement of the T Series copyright.

YouTube allows the uploading of videos (including music videos from films and music albums) on YouTube.com that are accessible to anyone surfing the web for free, and thus earn substantial revenues from advertisements on the website.

The business model of YouTube thus allows, encourages and profits from use of copyrighted work uploaded on the website without obtaining any license or permission from the rightful copyright owners and without paying them any royalty.

After hearing Amit Sibal, the counse for Super Cassettes India Limitedl, on November 5, the High Court issued notice and summons against YouTube and Google, Inc and passed an interim order restraining them from reproducing, adapting, distributing, communicating, transmitting, disseminating or displaying on their websites or otherwise infringing in any manner any audio visual works in which the SCIL owns exclusive, valid and subsisting copyright.

Thus, by its order, the High Court granted an injunction against the business practice of Youtube of earning profits at the expense of a rightful copyright owner.

YouTube LLC and its parent, Google Inc., have on their website YouTube.com been showing videos of SCIL's copyrighted songs without SCIL's license or permission, Sibal had told the court.

YouTube and Google profit at SCIL's expense by showing SCIL's songs for free to the public, while displaying advertising on the screen and collecting revenue from the advertisers based on the number of hits on the site, he argued.

The profits from this business model, which is based on copyright infringement, are enormous, as is indicated by the fact that Google paid 1.65 billion dollars in stock to acquire YouTube LLC.

He submitted that YouTube has caused tremendous loss of revenue to SCIL by infringing its copyright.

"There are websites who encourage unlicensed sharing and distribution of copyright content, which is a new form of piracy in the digital medium. Copyright is the engine of creative output of popular content. We have to ensure that the incentive to create and distribute popular content is protected from these large corporates which are trying to profit by destroying the value of the hard work of thousands of artistes, for whom their creative output is perhaps their only source of livelihood. " Sibal said. (ANI)