Hasta La Gadget!

May 13

YouTube Sued over Video: Fatal Crash at Great Egg Harbor

Posted in: Google, Today's Chili, Web Sites, YouTube

This article was written on May 25, 2007 by CyberNet.

The New Jersey Turnpike Authority (NJTA) has decided to sue video sites, including YouTube and Break.com, for posting footage of a crash that happened on May 10, 2007. The crash is very intense as a car travels southbound on the New Jersey Turnpike at very high speeds, and then crashes into the Great Egg Harbor Toll Plaza. The car then bursts into flames killing the 52–year-old driver.

I hadn’t seen the video before I heard this announcement of the lawsuit, and searching for someone that still had it posted was quite a headache! All of the sites have removed it (as expected), but searching a little deeper led me to Blinx who listed some MySpace postings of the video (here and here).

YouTube removed the video “because it violated our terms of services. Because our removal also complied with our obligations under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, we see no legal basis for a claim,” according to a spokesperson at YouTube. It also doesn’t make sense to me why they are getting sued if it was promptly removed, but I guess it is all part of the crazy world we live in.

I have taken a still image of the accident in case those videos get pulled as well. It will spoil the video, so I only recommend looking at the image if the videos don’t work. Of course, I also point out some things that you may not have noticed:

Egg Harbor Crash