Boy dupes YouTube to delete videos

A 15-year-old West Australian pretending to represent ABC TV succeeded in having more than 200 clips removed from the video-sharing website YouTube.

The boy signed a form claiming, "under penalty of perjury", that he represented the clips' copyright owners.

The segments, taken from The Chaser's War on Everything, were removed over a month and replaced by this message: "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Australian Broadcasting Corporation."

The latest clip to be removed featured Charles Firth accosting Hillary Clinton. It had been viewed more than 100,000 times before it was taken down yesterday.

"The head of ABC legal is contacting those involved," the head of arts, entertainment and comedy at ABC TV, Courtney Gibson, said. "We are very much keeping our options open in terms of what kind of action we take."

The ABC contacted YouTube after the clip was removed, and was provided with a copy of the form used to claim that a copyright infringement had been committed.

It had been filled out by hand, listing "Loop Australia" as the company acting for the "Australian Broddcasting Corperation".

The ABC has no affiliation with the company, or the boy whose Hotmail account was given as a business contact.

"I don't think we should prosecute him - we should probably hire him," said the Chaser's Julian Morrow. "If they are copyright crusaders, I hope they don't look too closely at the old days' The Chaser newspaper."

Ms Gibson said the removal of the clips was in direct contrast to ABC's policy on content sharing. "[ABC wishes] to get our content out there on as many platforms as possible, run by as many different operators as possible."

The incident comes after Viacom, parent company of MTV, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, filed a lawsuit seeking more than $US1 billion ($1.28 billion) from Google and YouTube for copyright infringement.