• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, February 16, 2007

The civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation appears to be mulling some sort of legal action against Viacom stemming from its recent demand that YouTube remove 100,000 clips -- including clips with no connection to Viacom -- from the site.

"Were You Caught in the Viacom Takedown?" the EFF asks in its own video, quietly uploaded to YouTube late last week. In the clip, the EFF says it wants to hear from any innocent parties caught in the recent dragnet. "If your video was taken down after complaints from Viacom, but contained either no viacom content at all, or fair use extracts, the Electronic Frontier Foundation would like to hear from you," the company wrote in comments posted with the clip -- viewed nearly 9,000 times as of Friday morning.

When Viacom served Google/YouTube with a list of videos to be expunged, Viacom included some clips that were entirely non-infringing. For instance, Viacom asked YouTube to take down a video of a group of friends having dinner at Redbones in Somerville, Mass.

Viacom says only a small number of clips were wrongly targeted and that they'll be reinstated.

Meantime, at least one uploader, Victor Rook, has indicated to the media that he might pursue a libel claim. When YouTube took down his clip, a trailer for a gay wrestler documentary, the site posted a note saying, "This video has been removed at the request of copyright owner Viacom International because its content was used without permission," according to CNET's News.com.

The message's wording has since been changed, but Rook remains unhappy that he was publicly accused of copyright infringement. "That note said to anyone looking for my trailer that I violated someone's copyright," Rook told News.com. "And that isn't true. That's where they defamed me."