Tokyo - After a second meeting with executives in Tokyo with YouTube and Google this week, a group of Japanese rights holders again demanded that their copyrighted material be removed from YouTube, the Associated Press reported.

"YouTube has to stop how it runs its site and get rid of the illegal clips. We want them to reset the service," composer Hideki Matsutake said on Thursday.

"There is no middle ground. We demand that all copyrighted material be removed immediately."

In October 2006, YouTube deleted some 30,000 files at the request of Japanese copyright holders, and in June of this year launched a Japanese version of its site, complete with copyright warnings in Japanese.

Google has said it hopes to launch a filtering system on YouTube before the end of the year.

"What's important to us is what YouTube can do immediately," Mizuo Sugawara of the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers told AP.

"We have no guarantee whether the new [filtering] technology will even work."

Related Links:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070802/ap_on_hi_te/japan_youtube_3 (AP)