Blog Insights: YouTube and the copyright dilemma

by Dan Blacharski

February 5, 2007 —

What bloggers are saying about the latest in information technology

YouTube has become massively popular as hundreds of thousands of users seek out their 15 minutes of fame on the popular video-sharing site. A brief review of its content reveals that most of it is forgettable and self-indulgent, although there are a few diamonds in the rough. As a vehicle for emerging artists to disseminate their work easily, YouTube has its place. I'm reminded of my younger days in the Haight-Ashbury, sitting around dark coffeehouses and reading our own (also forgettable and self-indulgent) poetry just for the sake of the experience and camaraderie. You may not get the same social experience with YouTube, but the element of having a vehicle for sharing your work is the same. It's something all writers and artists need. Some have called YouTube the "Internet's first real entertainment network" -- I wouldn't go quite that far, but it does have potential.

Regrettably, YouTube has become less of a vehicle for emerging artists, and more of a platform for slapped-together pieces of copyright infringement, created by provocateurs who loudly insist that since they are small and the copyright holders are large, they therefore have the right to infringe with impunity. These artists misunderstand the most basic concept of the copyright, which are, after all, for their own protection, should they ever have the good fortune to create something that brings them a paycheck. Copyright laws by their nature are designed to protect those who own a creative work, whether the copyright holder is a billion dollar corporation, or a self-publisher disseminating their own work on a small scale. I know it's stylish to decry the actions of large corporations, but fair is fair, and if you own it, you have the right to say where it goes, no matter how large or small you may be.

Today, an AP article reported that Viacom asked YouTube to remove over 100,000 clips that infringe on Viacom copyrights, after the two companies failed to come to any agreement on controlling unauthorized videos or providing compensation for copyrighted content. YouTube has also agreed in recent months to delete files after similar requests have been made by the Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers, as well as Universal Music Group. The latter went so far as to call YouTube a hub for pirated music videos.

As desirable as it is for YouTube to function as a vehicle for unknown emerging artists, YouTube must also survive in the long run, and allowing unknown artists to post their creations isn't going to make YouTube any money. YouTube wants partnerships with the major studios for professional content, and these partnerships are essential to its survival -- but to get the major studios on board, YouTube must not only comply with the take-down requests, but they must also take proactive steps on their own to make sure copyright infringement is kept to a minimum. YouTube has always complied with take-down requests made by copyright holders, but the bigger problem lies in when the same user, or another user, re-posts the same video after it has been taken down.

One would think that if Viacom can sort through YouTube's content to find infringements, YouTube themselves could do the same on a proactive basis and save themselves a lot of trouble. Granted, from a technological standpoint, filtering video is a lot trickier than filtering text, but as Mark Cuban hints at in his blog, the technology is possible, but Google/YouTube chooses to implement filtering only for specific companies that have made financial deals with them, as opposed to simply filtering their entire content database uniformly.

The ZDNet blog questions whether some innocent YouTubers are getting hurt in the process, noting that there are those who received take-down notices for content that did not violate any copyright. If you do receive such a notice, you do have the right to send a counter-notice, and there is a procedure for doing so. One obvious error on the part of Viacom was noted in a Harvard Law blog, where the blogger noted that a home video of himself and several friends having dinner at a restaurant was flagged by Viacom, and suggested a class action lawsuit. Probably overkill, in my opinion -- it's obviously an error. Send your counter-notice and re-post your dinner video. But while a class action lawsuit against Viacom or YouTube would probably be a waste of time and would probably cause more harm than good (although the lawyers would surely enjoy it), the writer makes an interesting speculation, wondering whether the filtering mechanism simply consists of comparing Viacom trademarked and copyrighted terms against every YouTube video title -- a filtering mechanism that would be inherently inaccurate and would generate a lot of false positives.

Filtering technology has come a long way and today is highly accurate and very efficient. URL filtering for example, was decried in its early stages as having a high rate of false positives, and the old example of URL filters kicking out web sites about breast cancer is simply no longer relevant. What YouTube needs to do is team up with one of the makers of web filtering technology to come up with a similar advanced tool for filtering YouTube videos, and then apply it uniformly.

ITworld.com