A court in Germany has ruled against video sharing website YouTube, ordering it to take down clips that have been copyrighted.

A German royalties group took Google's YouTube to court, accusing it of infringing the copyright on seven music clips.

YouTube argued it only provides the framework for people to post items and is not responsible for what is on its website.

But the court in Hamburg ruled the website was responsible for the content that its users published.

It said while YouTube did not have to proactively trawl through its site in search of possible copyright violations, it must remove clips at the request of the rights holder.

"We welcome this decision," a spokesman for Google in Germany said, saying the court's move created legal certainty for both uploading sites and the people who use them.

A spokesman for German royalty collections body GEMA said: "This in an important partial victory."

GEMA, which says it represents more than 64,000 songwriters and musicians, demands that music-on-demand platforms which stream music to users for free and are financed by advertisements pay just over 10 per cent of their music revenues, plus an additional per-stream fee.

YouTube says some 60 hours of video are uploaded to its site every minute, and more than 3 billion hours of video are watched on the platform each month.

The decision has been seen as the first step towards YouTube and other internet publishers having to pay large sums in royalties.

The ruling comes less than a month after a US appeals court dealt Google a major setback by reviving lawsuits from Viacom Inc, the English Premier League and various other media companies over the use of copyrighted videos on YouTube without permission.

ABC/Reuters