Moonbear said:
You don't need to know. Unless the parent company is the one uploading it, the person uploading it should be assumed to NOT have those rights.
As a viewer, it should not be my responsibility to check who uploaded each video and confirm that they are, in fact, the copyright holder. That being said, Viacom has stated that they will not be pursuing the viewers of copyrighted material (note that they have never claimed they will not raise charges against those who uploaded it).
It is the responsibility of the user uploading to not upload copyrighted content, and the responsibility of the copyright holder to defend their copyright.
Moonbear said:
This really isn't all that complex. The ONLY thing any individual user has the right to upload are their own home movies. Legally, I don't even have the right to upload a movie taken by a friend. For example, if I decided to upload one of the vacation videos Zz put together and sent me, if he really wanted to, he could sue Google/YouTube for distributing his copyrighted material without permission.
If you have permission from him, you can upload it. This is why it is not the responsibility of the viewer to check that the content is legal, it is
impossible for me to know if someone uploading copyrighted content has permission from the holder of the copyright.
Moonbear said:
I honestly don't know how YouTube has gotten away with it this long.
They have gotten away with it for this long because they have done nothing wrong (more on this below).
Moonbear said:
Your loyalties are misplaced to refuse to buy something because Viacom has asserted their rights and had material removed from YouTube.
Basically, Evo is refusing to purchase from a company because they refuse to provide a `free sample'. There is no legal requirement for the company to provide such, but it is perfectly reasonable to refuse to purchase from a company that doesn't, or to refuse to purchase from a company for any other part of their business model which you disapprove.
Moonbear said:
Basically, if Google is providing the means to have these things uploaded, it is their responsibility to find a way to know what's being uploaded and if it's allowed. If they can't do that, then they just need to shut down YouTube completely. Google has been trying to shift the burden to the copyright owners, which is absolutely ridiculous. It's Google's business, they need to run it on accordance with the law.
According to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (in the US), as long as the internet service (google/youtube) promptly removes copyrighted content from their site, they are living up to their requirements. It is no more reasonable to expect Google to police youtube for copyright than it is to expect ISP's to police their public websites. Further, until a copyright holder (Viacom) actually requests that a video be removed/notifies google that it is unauthorized, google cannot reasonably be expected to know if it were posted with or without permission. For all Google knows, it was posted with full permission from the original copyright holder.
What measures would you propose be required as a minimum for preventing copyright infringement? Should google employees have to view every single video uploaded to check if it's copyrighted, then check the IP addresses of the uploader, and if they were uploaded by an IP address not belonging to the copyright holder, demand proof of permission? What form should that proof take? Would a scanned copy of a signed letter work? That can be forged. How about an email from the company in question? Also can be forged. There is literally
no way for Google/youtube to know if a video was posted without permission, until the copyright holder notifies them.
As far as "they need to run it on accordance with the law", according to Digital Millennium Copyright Act, they are doing exactly that by promptly removing any copyright violations reported to them.
Moonbear said:
And, as you point out, it might be in Viacom's interest to provide some clips to YouTube to entice viewers, and even to pay Google for that. So, why then is Google allowing just anyone to upload crappy pirated copies of shows when they could charge companies to upload trailers? They're obviously making more money off all the pirated copies, otherwise self-interest would motivate a different business model.
youtube does
not produce a profit, it was originally started based on the ideal of free access to information/videos, funded by advertising. Google bought it because the rest of their business depends partly on free access to information online, and they knew that youtube would be the target of lawsuits. They wanted to be able to use their other financial resources to fund the lawsuit, to protect free access to information. If they can stop this one here, it will prevent companies from trying to sue google itself for other so called 'copyright infringements'. The lawsuit is (almost certainly) doomed to failure, because Google has complied with the law as it stands now. The law can be ammended, true, but the ammendment cannot be retroactively enforced. They cannot be punished for breaking laws which do not yet exist.
A strategy which I would forsee as having a much higher chance of success for Viacom, would be to begin raising lawsuits against the uploaders. They can subpoena the records of the uploaders, and bring charges up against them, much the same way that the recording industry once did.
Edit: As an aside, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has been frequently criticized as being too much in favour of the copyright holder. If there is interest in discussing digital copyright law, and its benefits and drawbacks, we should start a new thread.
