YouTube AntiPiracy Policy Likened to 'Mafia Shakedown' 103
A C|Net article discusses reactions to YouTube's newly proposed antipiracy software policy. The company is now offering assistance for IP holders, allowing them to keep track of their content on the YouTube service ... if they sign up with the company for licensing agreements. A spokesman for Viacom (already in a fight with YouTube to take down numerous video clips) called this policy 'unacceptable', and another industry analyst likened it to a 'mafia shakedown.' YouTubes cites the challenges of determining ownership of a given video clip as the reason for this policy, and hopes that IP owners will cooperate in resolving these issues. Some onlookers also feel that these protestations are simply saber-rattling before an eventual deal: "'The debates are about negotiations more than anything else--who's going to pay whom and how much,' said Saul Berman, IBM's global media and entertainment strategy leader."
Doesn't YouTube know (Score:1, Insightful)
Tilting at windmills (Score:4, Insightful)
So they bemoan having to pay for their enforcement (Score:5, Insightful)
The public has to pay for police work in taxes, the government has to pay employees for studies, every major corporation has to pay their security guards and in most cases security system contractors to keep their buildings secure.
The media industries should be no different. If they want others to be looking out for their interests, they should be paying those people for their troubles.
Irony? (Score:3, Insightful)
Or is it hipocracy?
So let me get this right? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, they host them, and perhaps can or do check them, but the law doesn't say that people need to check for IP rights before using something (IIRC) and that it is the IP holder's job to request the violator change their use of the IP or take it down.
If YouTube did this free, they would become IP policemen, and that can't be cheap. Why wouldn't they charge for this service? To me, this doesn't sound like mafia tactics so much as it sounds like business tactics. Offer a service and charge for it. I am thinking that Google et al haven't figured out how to generate ad revenue from this service so they want to charge for it.
Sounds like simple business practice to me. I might be wrong though.
Screw YouTube... (Score:5, Insightful)
A friend of mine's Daria fan animations (no they aren't hentai) got taken off of YouTube. Viacom has been approving of fan films in the past, the most elaborate of which being the Star Trek: The Original Series continuation "The New Voyages," hosted at http://www.newvoyages.com/ [newvoyages.com] . The fan films got swept up in the Viacom/YouTube dragnet. This pissed me off because quite a few people from the Daria fandom were involved, and they really were nicely done.
Hopefully an appeal to have the fan films reinstated will be successful.
The screwed thing is that unless you take a lot of trouble with 3rd party apps you cannot download a YouTube
There are alternatives. Metacafe, Ning, Revver...all excellent choices for showing your stuff. And there is always BIT TORRENT for something a bit higher quality and a bit more permanent.
Big media needs to grow a brain. YouTube needs to grow a spine. Everyone wins when content is up on YouTube. Everyone loses when these silly fights start up.
Re:Tilting at windmills (Score:4, Insightful)
Every time I see a story like this, it just upsets me. It's going against our culture, which values sharing and building upon others' work, and making use of what we already have to create new things. What's the point of this? It's just tilting at windmills -- those values are so ingrained in us that they're not going to go away.
I agree with you, but if you log on to YouTube many uploads there are nothing more than TV broadcasts stripped of commercials. Uploaders aren't creating anything, they're just engaging in copyright infringement. I think copyright laws need to be a little more relaxed about "clip-and-snip", where people genuinely create something new by piecing together other (copyrighted) stuff, but I have no patience with people whose idea of "sharing" is just wholesale redistribution of copyrighted material.
Re:Tilting at windmills (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Screw YouTube... (Score:4, Insightful)
They are going to become the Napster of online video... An awesome service when it was all free and full of pirated stuff. Now that it's going legal and making deals with the industry, it's probably going to suck.
Or more likely, with translation (Score:5, Insightful)
Daring fire-style translation :
No, we won't let you just pipe the results of your auto-suit-bots into our database.
Identifying actual copyright infrigment, from fair use, from complete false-positive is a very difficult job and if we botch it, people are going to make fun of all of us including YouTube, like it hapened before with the tutorials. So please now pay for the actual work force needed to perform what you ask.
Re:So they bemoan having to pay for their enforcem (Score:2, Insightful)
The owner of a copyrighted video is not and should not be obligated to make deals with every damn video sharing site just for the priviledge of having that copyright honored. It's quite obvious that as long as it is illegal to host those videos without permission from the owner, the sharing sites are alone responsible for their "troubles".
Re:Tilting at windmills (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess the confusion here lies in the distinction between physically property and intellectual property. Is is really fair that someone can have exclusive rights to an 'idea' or should they just just be able to make money out of the application of this idea? Copyrights inhibit growth. They discourage people from reusing good ideas and building on top of them. They encourage people to rebuild their own type of wheel. so where does this fit with IP? People need to be able to make money out of the work that they do, but perhaps the current system is flawed. No matter how much they fight piracy and sharing it will always exist, it is the nature of humans to share things. "hey John have you heard this great new album by band X? its great, ..no.... you can't listen to mine go buy your own".
There will always be free riders looking for a free lunch.....as i have been in the past...and sometimes i still am. But i believe that ultimatley it is only good for the artist / producer or whatever it is that is getting ripped off. If you were a band, that made an album or a video clip, would you rather sell 10,000 albums and have 10,000 fans with no one sharing your material, or sell 10,000 albums and have them sharing your work and have 1 million fans? what is better for your music and your future in the industry? I think that being know and getting noticed counts more than actual sales. It will always eventually lead back to sales, ticket sales for concerts etc. Even if only 5,000 people bought the album because the rest copied it, if they share it they are promoting your band which is basically free marketing. That will always lead to sales.
Re:So they bemoan having to pay for their enforcem (Score:3, Insightful)
Copyright infringement is a civil offence, which includes different penalties, and different rules.
Repeat 100x
Copyright infringement != Burglary
The burden of preventing copyright infringement lies with the rights holder. They have certain actions they can compel others to take with regard to their copyrighted material, and legal recourse if those actions are not taken. This does not extend to bringing the full weight of the criminal justice system to bear against copyright infringers. This is fair because a copyright is not physical property, and copyright itself is a social contract between creators and the public. It is already very unfair on the public due to the Berne convention, and does not serve the purpose it was originally intended for (enriching the public domain). Are you suggesting it should be made more unfair?
Re:So let me get this right? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Tilting at windmills (Score:4, Insightful)
This isn't actually true. Our system of copyright is rather new, as the idea is only about as old as our country. Large scale works (opera, architecture, large paintings, manuscripts, etc. in those days) existed for centuries before copyright was invented.
The old system relied on patronage. People with money and power supplied the capital needed for large projects, and hence called the shots on their production. I think this system could be resurrected pretty easily, since there are already a number of government and non-profit organizations that fund film and television productions now. I don't know if we'd ever have patronage-funded $100M-budget blockbusters, but I'm not sure that's an argument against the system.
Also, and more broadly, our experiment with copyright started with a 14-year term. Given that the last works to enter the public domain were produced before my grand-parents were born, I think we've effectively established infinite copyright terms at this point. So I think the media conglomerates have effectively forfeited any moral right to copyright they may have had by stealing the public domain from us. After all, the enrichment of the public domain is the only excuse for giving creators a temporary monopoly in the first place.
-Esme