Thursday, April 09, 2009

EFF lawyer calls for boycott of YouTube - ZDNet

Hat tip to Slashdot:

According to this report by Richard Koman of ZDNet, EFF lawyer Fred Von Lohmann has called on YouTube customers to boycott YouTube in favor of other sites more protective of their customers' fair use rights.

Commentary & discussion:

Slashdot





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3 comments:

Not Telling said...

YouTube is not going to get boycotted. It's the #3 most visited site on the internet and this is due to the intense integration with Google search results, the snowball effect of embedding videos in social networking sites, and the immense publicity that it gets.

YouTube has a difficult game to play; they implemented many systems - which go well beyond their obligations under the DMCA - to protect the rights of copyright owners, and they still end up getting sued.

YouTube gets more than 12 hours of videos uploaded every minute. Some of these videos are entirely user createed. Some of these videos include works owned by third parties, but whose use is considered fair use. And some of these videos are infringing.

YouTube is not in a position to review all of the videos identified as infringing on copyrights.

And in any regard, if YouTube disallowed the disabling of videos unless they meet the requirements set forth in the article, the copyright owners would just send DMCA requests anyways.

BayTSP deals with all of the major MPAA and RIAA members, and they automatically index every single YouTube video that is uploaded. So they can send DMCA take-down notices for these videos without the need for a content ID system.

YouTube was (and probably still is) in a position where they implemented the DMCA. Then copyright holders started accusing them of profiting from infringing content, and from choosing to ignore the infringing content on their site, which they are capable of taking down. And they started to complain that they were incapable of reviewing videos that were private or had misleading titles. So YouTube had no choice but to implement this system.

In many cases, copyright holder have chosen to allow uploaded content to remain on YouTube (in exchange for ad revenue).

And they are not the only website doing this. Veoh.com is even worse. They have a content ID system that automatically disables videos that match different fingerprints. They don't tell you what it matched. They don't tell you who the copyright holder is. They don't even notify the copyright holder or allow them to decide if they want the video to remain up.

Richard Koman said...

thanks for the link, ray.
richard

raybeckerman said...

Thank YOU Richard, for the ALWAYS excellent reportage!