JASRAC Opts-Out of YouTube

YouTube has removed nearly 30,000 videos that were flagged as infringing copyright by the Japan Society for Rights and Authors, Composers, and Publishers (JASRAC), a Japanese equivalent of the RIAA. But don't worry too much, JASRAC actually went through the trouble of identifying all those videos themselves and asked YouTube to remove them, following the opt-out policy inspired by Google and encouraged by the DMCA safe harbor provisions. This actually helps legitimize the policy by showing it's really not that hard to do, but whether the cost of flagging that many videos is worth removing them from YouTube remains to be seen.