YouTube: The Big Copyright Lie

“Now think back through all the videos you’ve watched on YouTube. How many of them contained any original content?”

Jeff,

Very true, and the SAD part is that every bit of that “original” content is copyrighted. Not in YouTube’s list of examples is the case. I shoot a video. IT IS COPYRIGHT. I own the copyright, and so I am allowed to upload it to youtube. But it is still copyright unless I explicitly release it into the public domain.

http://free-culture.cc for more information and in particular I recommend Lessig’s OSCON 2002 keynote: http://www.eff.org/IP/freeculture/free.html


j

If YouTube really wanted to stop people from uploading copyrighted material all they really need to do is to force people to identify who they are and hold them accountable. Heck, they could use PayPal to validate the user and establish terms of service that would allow content owners to go directly after abusers. This could also be extended to foreign users in countries where contract law is respected with the USA. Hardly rocket science.

How much was taken? YouTube instituted a 10 minute
length limit, probably to prevent excessive use claims
from taking root. It’s a policy that seems to work.

You mention yourself above that it’s about “the relative amount of the portion used,” so in that sense, a time limitation on your videos may be detrimental to them being fair use. Imagine a 1 hour documentary you shot yourself which is a debate of “movie XYZ,” and it includes 2 minutes of movie XYZ in the first 8 minutes. Thanks to the 10 minutes time limit, your usage of the clip on YouTube now became less fair use, because you show 2 minutes out of 10 (20%) instead of 2 minutes out of 60 (3.3%).

But yes, agreed, the YouTube policy is total hypocrisy.

When I have time to go to a movie, I usually have to sit through several short movie clips (usually less than 10 min) before the movie starts. The makers of the full length versions of these movies have to pay to get their clips in the movie.

In my opinion, YouTube does not get shutdown because many of their clips are free advertising. If I go to YouTube and watch a funny clip of the Simpson’s movie, I am not more inclined to pay to go see the full thing.

Same holds for TV Shows. If I see a clip I like, I now want to see the whole thing, something that YouTube cannot conveniently offer. This leads me to the normal commercial channels to purchase the content.

If Napster had only offered short segments of songs at sub digital quality (similar to what YouTube does), I think they would still be around today (though no one would really be interested in a site like that).

In short, they don’t get shutdown because it is free advertising. In the case were the advertising is negative they send a copyright notice and get it removed.

Welcome to internet law and copyrights. You have a good write-up here… But really, YouTube is just a more solid and seeable instance of what has been happening across the entire internet in regard to copyright laws and such. The difference being that most institutions don’t even bother with such a copyright exception.

The “hypocrisy” makes perfect sense if you read the DMCA safe harbor provisions—YouTube gets a free ride because of the terms of the DMCA, which says that if the online provider doesn’t know about the copyright infringement, then they basically are safe from being sued as long as they take it down when requested to by the copyright hoder.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability_Limitation_Act#Requirements_to_obtain_the_safe_harbor

Is it hypocrisy? How so? They put up the requisite “we don’t condone copyright infringement” messages, but everyone knows that’s a nod towards the courts. You might as well criticize the company for making q-tips as hypocritical because they say not to use them to clean your ears (and give dozens of examples of other potential uses people might have for them, when of course everyone uses them to clean their ears).

They don’t get any more or less of a free ride than anyone else. It has to do with them being a big system that hosts user content. If you set up something similar you’d be covered by the same laws.

(As for fair use, it doesn’t really matter here. It’s a defensive activity; YouTube would never want to rely on it because it would mean they’d have to be in front of a judge to defend it. Why would they allow themselves to get into such a position over a Muppets clip? They’d rather just take it down.)

YouTube’s approach isn’t as bad as Imageshack’s terse summary of their ToS.

'Short version of the ImageShack Terms of Service: Don’t upload anything that can be even remotely construed as porn, copyrighted material, harassment, or spam. If you do, we will ban you, delete all your images, and prevent you from viewing any images hosted on ImageShack.'
http://reg.imageshack.us/content.php?page=rules

Yes, they really do tell you copyrighted material is forbidden full stop, without any reference to permission or even the possibility that you might hold the copyright yourself.

Heck, they could use PayPal to validate the user and establish terms of
service that would allow content owners to go directly after abusers.
This could also be extended to foreign users in countries where
contract law is respected with the USA. Hardly rocket science.

This would significantly decrease the number of videos on the site and with them Google’s advertising revenue. Anyways, users wouldn’t end up getting sued; why bother when Google has all the money? Selling out their users to big content would violate Don’t Be Evil, alienate users, and destroy safe harbor immunity, with almost no practical benefit besides a better relationship with content. Plus, it’s completely infeasible, especially the part about foreign users.

You misunderstand the “Fair Use” part of the law. It’s not that YouTube doesn’t care, it can’t care. Any attempt to edit what users post before they post it makes YouTube liable for content since they are no longer a common carrier, but a publisher and editor.

If YouTube caught 99% of the copyright infringement, but the last 1% slipped through, YouTube and Google would be directly liable for copy right infringement – even though they are taking steps to stop it, and stopped almost all of it. If you’re playing publisher, you’ve become responsible for everything you publish.

By simply being a common carrier, YouTube can avoid the headaches associated with filtering content.

The problem is that the Fair Use provision didn’t anticipate a YouTube. The fair use provision imagined a CompuServe and its forums. If someone on some forum published copyrighted material, CompuServe couldn’t be held liable.

YouTube, however, isn’t just some forum. All the CompuServe forums put together may have had 100,000 active posters (if that many) spread across thousands of forums. CompuServe forums were also pretty much text based, so the copyright infringement was someone posting copyrighted works. YouTube is one big forum with hundreds of millions of users. It includes media like songs and video and all users are pretty much on a single “forum”, so all have access to that content. And, the content is much more attractive to users. If someone published a copy righted story on CompuServe, maybe 100 people might read it. Post yesterday’s Daily Show, and you’ll have 100 million downloads.

I don’t know what the “solution” would be. YouTube cannot act as editor without actually incurring legal obligations. At the same time, it is unfair for Viacom and others to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars each day scouring YouTube for copyrighted material and requesting that it get taken down.

Of course, you could argue that Viacom has to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars anyway scouring the entire Internet for copy right infringement, and maybe YouTube actually makes their job easier because it is your one stop copyright infringement place. A simple query on YouTube will bring up all of your copyright infringed material. No more surfing from website to website looking for copyright infringed stuff.

  • Don’t single out YouTube. Every video sharing site has the same issues. At least YouTube makes an effort to tell you what you shouldn’t upload.

  • They don’t have the man power (they can’t do this technically) to watch every single video uploaded to make sure it’s not copyrighted before they post it.

  • Amazon let’s you listen to music clips for songs they sell. I think it’s OK to do the same for video.

  • What’s YouTube’s business model from day one? I think they expected people to put their own personal videos and not stuff taped from copyright materials.

So, just to get this straight, if I create something then I have no right to expect a say in what happens to it after I create it?
I think that is a great idea.
If you don’t like the TOS don’t use the service. It’s pretty simple. Just create your own service with TOS that you do agree with.

Fragile content, line-noise link names, and low-quality video I can’t save?

You CAN save (and convert) YouTube clips.

http://www.google.com/search?q=save+youtube+clip

What free ride? They were hit with a billion-dollar lawsuit:

http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/google/viacomyoutube31307cmp.html

YouTube’s hypocrisy is there because it’s easier to build something that demonstrates the law is BS than it is to fight to change the law armed only with hypotheticals. They needed to lie in order to build it.

Copyright law is corrupt, corruption breeds hypocrisy, exposing hypocrisy sometimes leads to change, and sometimes leads to further corruption. It’s a cycle. You have to attack the root corruption to get any results.

You should consider becoming a vlogger on YouTube. Text blogging is so old media. Vloggers produce original content and have made YouTube the most significant social networking site on the Internet. YouTube vloggers have a very strong sense of community. You should also check out the Stickam web site where YouTube vloggers hold web conferences and stay up late.

Folk hero!

a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga5A76weN5I"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga5A76weN5I/a

As an independent user who has created 20 useful youtube videos (I make software tutorials for music producers) I believe you have it wrong. You, sir, may watch copyrighted videos as a majority of your youtube views, but I only submit that you are missing out. Behind the front page of youtube you will find countless informational videos, live performances of real, original and uncopyrighted music, and interviews with true personalities. To say that Youtube based it’s business model on Copyrighted works only indicates that you have skimmed through only the videos you have familiarity with. Kids in the hall, Tarantino, etc. Try stepping outside of your box and you will find vibrant communities at work within youtube, collaborating, innovating, and thriving. My videos may not be as popular as the movie trailers, or every single episode of Family Guy on youtube, but I get to interact and collaborate with real people, and I know from the private comments that I recieve, that I am making a real difference in someone’s career.

-Acepincter

“Content is King”, hence the success of Google’s YouTube. The RIAA is going after rogue downloaders, but every music video I’ve ever seen on MTV is on YouTube. This makes me go “huh?”. Sure, distribution is much easier, and yes if an artist exclusively sells their material themselves they make the majority of the money, but the material still gets copied around the net at an alarming rate. I think one of the other loopholes with YouTube, is that the uploaders aren’t making a profit when re-distributing the content. If YouTube charged for access, they would have gotten shut down a long time ago.

You can identify copyrighted material by watermarks. They survive quite a bit these days.

I saw a presentation back in my undergrad years at Brooklyn College by a guy who was researching watermarks. Movies have lots of data into which you can embed them.

Greg

I think another reason for Youtube being alive is that it has Google backing it. Any industry will think twice before attacking Google.

Youtube has no respect for Fair Use whatsoever, and I have witnessed the bullshit often. Someone got banned for reviewing an SNES game due to a fraudulent DMCA claim by ESPN. Video game reviews are FAIR USE. If you aren’t lining youtube’s pockets, they don’t give a shit about you.