The letters that were sent by “Copyright and Communication Consulting Agency / Latvian authors associations (AKKA / LAA) to owners of many web portals and blogs in which AKKA / LAA invites them to pay money for videos that were embeded in their sites from YouTube.com has quickly become a very popular topic among latvian internet users. Now the Latvian Internet Association (LIA) have finally declared their stand in this controversial question – Viesturs Pless Šeļmanovs, who is the executive director of LIA, indicates that the there is no legal justification for AKKA / LAAs action. Latvian Internet Associations view is based on the 6th chapter of the Latvian Republic Copyright Law Article 19, which clearly defines that copyright is not to be regarded as contravened, if, without the authors consent and without remuneration is used publicly available or exhibited work. Since YouTube videos are publicly available works, the copyright in this case can not be violated. In addition, it is assumed that the YouTube video service have already paid for publishing these videos.

We remind you that the YouTube videos can be published via embedding code, which is freely available to any user of the YouTube video service. ISA also pointed out that Latvian sites are only linked to YouTube, but the video files are actually located on the YouTube server, so the blog and website owners can not be attributed to copyright infringement, because the video is not being stored on their servers.
LIA also said that, AKKA / LAA acted very incorrectly and confused Latvian citizens and companies by already preparing settlement contracts. As well as the organizations publicly expressed opinion points to a lack of understanding possibilities of the modern technologies.
AKKA / LAAs recent actions has also lead to a frontlash from Latvian bloggers – many Latvian blogs have now published a special YouTube video where bloggers express a protest against the actions of AKKA / LAA. Here you can take a look at the bloggers protest video:




