YouTube removes 30,000 Japanese clips

Copyrighted clips, because they were asked to. The first company to sue Google over this could easily win the case. There's no way Google can argue that they never knew copyrighted work was on their site. Unlike the search engine itself, which only points folk to where the copyrighted info resides, YouTube is currently completely bypassing the copyright holders, for profitable purposes. The onus is on Google to stop such clips from being uploaded in the first place.

It looks like Google will ask copyright holders to ad a watermark to their videos that identifies it as copyrighted. Although this is a great idea for the web in general, I suspect many/most won't bother, not initially anyway.