YouTube In The Spotlight For Hosting Racist Material

YouTube is in a spot of bother in Germany for hosting Nazi related material uploaded by users.

Clips include scenes from the 1940 Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda film Jud Suess and music videos from German far-right rock band Landser.

A German parliamentarian was quoted as saying that YouTube hosting these films “amounts to aiding and abetting incitement of these people.” The display of Nazi imagery or logos, or supporting Nazi ideals is illegal in Germany and punishable by jail time as well as severe fines.

According to a ZDNet report Germany’s Central Council of Jews Vice President Salomon Korn was considering pressing charges against Google Germany over the matter.

eBuddy Adds MySpace Instant Messaging

European web chat startup eBuddy, which is in a fight-to-the-death struggle with Silicon Valley based Meebo, just added support for MySpace instant messaging tor their product.

eBuddy now supports MySpace IM, AOL, ICQ, GoogleTalk, MSN and Yahoo. Log in to some of all of these services from the eBuddy home page.

MySpace says they now have over 18.5 million users of the service, which soft launched in September 2006. By comparison, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and AIM have 224 million, 93 million, 30 million and 30 million users, respectively (Comscore worldwide - July 2007). GTalk trails the rest, with just 4.8 million users.

Rumor is that Trillian, a downloadable piece of software that also accesses all major IM networks except Skype, will be adding MySpace support soon, too.