The International Council Of Creators And Music, which is part of the globally focused songwriters body CISAC, has given its support to a legal claim against YouTube in Germany that I'm calling the Sarah Brightman case. A group of German producers and songwriters announced last month that they were suing YouTube through the German courts.

It's the classic anti-YouTube legal dispute. The claimants say that the video sharing website does not do enough to stop punters from uploading copyright infringing content and that YouTube are therefore guilty of infringement themselves, from the time a video gets uploaded without the copyright owner's permission to the point at which they take it down.

YouTube argues that because they remove content as soon as they receive a takedown notice from a content owner they are inline with copyright rules. The claimants argue it is unfair that the onus should be on them to monitor the uploading of infringing content onto YouTube's websites.

I'm not sure what German copyright law says about such things, probably very little, which means the court case has the potential to set an interesting precedent. Even in the US, where the law is a bit clearer on such things, the issue has been disputed in court and - while the argument being used by YouTube has generally been successful in defeating this kind of copyright claim - the ruling in the ongoing Viacom v YouTube case, also on this issue, could as yet prove significant, if it ever reaches court.

Of course, arguably, new content recognition software being employed by YouTube to block uncleared videos before they go live would satisfy most courts that the video service is doing all it can to stop others uploading infringing content onto its website. So even if they are guilty of past infringement, it is unlikely they'd need to make any changes to current operations.

Anyway, the ICCM has said it supports the German claim, being made by, amongst others, producer Frank Peterson, best known for his work with Brightman. In a statement issued this week, the Council said: [We] welcome and wholeheartedly support these actions by authors in Germany, in order to clarify to what extent in particular the moral rights of music authors have been permanently damaged by the defendants and furthermore whether the responsible directors of Google can be personally called to account for illegal distribution of music on an unprecedented scale".