A re­quest from the T&T Gov­ern­ment for the re­moval of ten videos cur­rent­ly post­ed on YouTube has been de­clined. The videos are par­o­dies which fea­ture Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar and At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan.

Nine of the videos fea­ture Per­sad-Bisses­sar danc­ing with a bot­tle in hand, while Ram­lo­gan is fea­tured in an in­ter­view which took place last year with Head of News at TV6 Do­minic Kaliper­sad. In the heat­ed in­ter­view with Kaliper­sad on the top­ic of the state of emer­gency, the vet­er­an news­man ad­mon­ished the AG at one point thus: "Please don't be rude." So far, the videos have gen­er­at­ed more than 300,000 hits.

Ac­cord­ing to the search en­gine Google's Trans­paren­cy Re­port, from Jan­u­ary 2012-June 2012, T&T was among 19 coun­tries re­quest­ing that videos be re­moved for al­leged defama­tion. Among the oth­er coun­tries which re­quest­ed that con­tent be re­moved were the Unit­ed States, Chi­na, In­dia, Italy, Turkey and the Unit­ed King­dom.

The re­port states: "We re­ceived a re­quest from le­gal rep­re­sen­ta­tives of a mem­ber of the ex­ec­u­tive branch to re­move ten YouTube videos for al­leged defama­tion. We did not re­move con­tent in re­sponse to this re­quest."

Google said it al­so re­ceives reg­u­lar re­quests from copy­right own­ers and re­port­ing or­gan­i­sa­tions which rep­re­sent them, ask­ing for ma­te­r­i­al to be re­moved. "Like oth­er tech­nol­o­gy and com­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­nies, Google reg­u­lar­ly re­ceives re­quests from gov­ern­ment agen­cies and courts around the world to re­move con­tent from our ser­vices," Google said.

Not­ing that gov­ern­ments had asked Google to re­move con­tent for many dif­fer­ent rea­sons, the search en­gine, which bought YouTube six years ago, said some con­tent re­movals were re­quest­ed be­cause of al­le­ga­tions of defama­tion, "while oth­ers are due to al­le­ga­tions that the con­tent vi­o­lates lo­cal laws pro­hibit­ing hate speech or pornog­ra­phy. "Laws sur­round­ing these is­sues vary by coun­try, and the re­quests re­flect the le­gal con­text of a giv­en ju­ris­dic­tion."

Google said there were nu­mer­ous rea­sons why the re­quest­ed con­tent might not be re­moved. "Some re­quests may not be spe­cif­ic enough for us to know what the gov­ern­ment want­ed us to re­move (for ex­am­ple, no URL is list­ed in the re­quest), and oth­ers in­volve al­le­ga­tions of defama­tion through in­for­mal let­ters from gov­ern­ment agen­cies, rather than court or­ders."

Google not­ed that oc­ca­sion­al­ly, it had in the past re­ceived fal­si­fied court or­ders for con­tent to be pulled from its site. How­ev­er, once such re­quests have proven to be false (this is de­ter­mined af­ter rig­or­ous checks), the re­quest will not be com­plied with." Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Min­is­ter Ja­mal Mo­hammed could not be reached for com­ment yes­ter­day.