About the YouTube Purchase In Regards to Copyright
YouTube has been much in the news lately. Around the time it was bought by Google for $1.65 billion, YouTube signed copyright licensing deals with CBS television and two record companies (UMG and Sony BMG). Meanwhile, its smaller rivals Bolt and Grouper were sued by the record industry for infringement.
The copyright deals are interesting. The first question to ask is whether YouTube needed the deals legally — whether it was breaking the law before. There’s no doubt that some of the videos that users upload to YouTube include infringing video and audio content. You might think this makes YouTube an infringer. But the law exempts service providers from liability for material stored on a server at users’ request, as long as certain conditions are met, including a requirement that the service provider take down material promptly on being notified that specific content appears to be infringing. (See section 512(c) of the DMCA.) Whether a site like YouTube qualifies for this exemption will be one of the main issues in the lawsuits against Bolt and Grouper.
It’s easy to see why CBS and the record companies want a deal with YouTube — they get money and greater control over where their content shows up on YouTube. Reading between the lines in the articles, it looks like YouTube will give them fairly direct means of taking down videos that they think infringe their copyrights.
But even if it faces no legal risk, YouTube might want to make these deals anyway. If users feel safer in posting CBS, UMG and Sony BMG content on the site, they’ll post more of that content, and they’ll face fewer frustrating takedowns. The deals might give YouTube users more confidence in using the site, which can only help YouTube.
Whether YouTube qualifies for the legal exemption is an interesting question for lawyers to debate. But in today’s copyright policy environment, whether a company is breaking the law is only one piece of the equation.
[thanks to Freedom to Tinker and jonsson via cc]
MySpace Is Setting Up a Spy Program: The Gracenote Block
This is big news in the social networking world and something you should be aware of if you’re a fan of website MySpace. There will be a partnership in the coming days with California startup Gracenote that aims to find out if you’re sharing copyrighted music and video and if you have any in your MySpace profile pages. The goal for this is to prevent MySpace members from posting copyrighted music and media on their MySpace profiles. This helps them stay in line with the mandated copyright enforcement policies as well as staying in line with any DMCA notices that might come their way from the RIAA.
YouTube has also gone this route, but they are not just simply planning on blocking this content. They are trying to get the copyright holder to allow the user to use that media but to add an advertisement on the bottom to help them gain revenue while not criminalizing the behavior of their users. It’s a small bar on the bottom of the video that gives the name of the song to the viewer and an opportunity to purchase the song if they choose.
The reason for this decision by MySpace seems to be the proliferation of copyrighted media, especially music, being shared all across social networking sites. More than 3 million artists and bands have MySpace profiles, which have become almost a necessity for artists to have. Bebo, which is a competitor to MySpace and Facebook, has more than 300,000 artists after only one year.
The YouTube smooth ride may be coming to an end, however. There have been multiple DMCA claims against YouTube and they have complied by removing more than 30,000 Japanese clips and Comedy Central clips as well. There is some talk that some advertising and promotion executives have anonymously sent clips of their shows to YouTube in order to drum up popular interest in the show while at the same time their lawyers may be sending DMCA letters to the very same website.
YouTube.com and Copyright Law
When Google bought YouTube, the conventional wisdom – expressed in op-eds, newspaper articles, and scary editorial cartoons – was that they’d also bought themselves a whole heap of copyright trouble. The New York Times used the phrase “litigation-laden landmine.” Part-time copyright theorist Mark Cuban warned that YouTube would face the same copyright fate as Napster.
There’s only one problem with these theories: the copyright law itself. Under the copyright code, YouTube is in much better legal shape than anyone seems to want to accept. The site enjoys a strong legal “safe harbor,” a law largely respected by the television and film industries for the choices it gives them.
Stated otherwise, much of the copyrighted material on YouTube is in a legal category that is new to our age. It’s not “fair use,” the famous right to use works despite technical infringement, for reasons of public policy. Instead, it’s in the growing category of “tolerated use”—use that is technically illegal, but tolerated by the owner because he wants the publicity. If that sounds as weird as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” you’re getting the idea. The industry is deeply conflicted about mild forms of piracy—trapped somewhere between its pathological hatred of “pirates” and its lust for the buzz piracy can build.
If the Internet were not a bookstore, or tubes, but rather a red-light district, YouTube would best be imagined as the hotel, and Napster, well, the pimp. YouTube, like a hotel, provides space for people to do things, legal or not. It’s not doing anything illegal itself, but its visitors may be. But Napster, everyone more or less now admits, was cast as the pimp: It was mainly a means of getting illegal stuff. Right or wrong, we seem to accept the benign vision of YouTube as an entity which, unlike Napster, was basically born as a place to showcase stupid human tricks.
The upshot is, as YouTube goes mainstream, copyright’s etiquette rules are becoming clearer. Yes, these sites can make it easier to infringe copyright. But so long as that’s not the principal aim of your company, you have more breathing room today than you once did. And under the emerging regime, if you do cause infringement, you have to be nice about it and make determined efforts to stop it. Apple has learned that dance well, even as its iPods make swapping music all the more part of being American. And YouTube has, in turn, learned from Apple the early lessons of Napster: You can act out in cyberspace. Just don’t be a copyright pimp.”
[Source: Slate]
