Is YouTube Down the Tubes?
by
on May 05, 2007,
What is the problem? YouTube and Google just allow people to share content right? Well, someone else does not like their content being shared as more news arrives of yet another lawsuit against the dynamic duo of Google and YouTube. Plaintiffs including the English Premier Soccer League are suing over copyright infringement allegations.
News from Reuters/Yahoo just revealed the filings in the U.S. District Court in New York by the Football Association Premier League Ltd. and music publisher Bourne Co. According to this story the lawsuit charges YouTube with deliberately encouraging massive copyright infringement in an effort to boost traffic and generate PR. This is not the first BarBQ for Google and YouTube, but this suit nails the defendants in a seemingly more descriptive way and words Google/YouTube's actions in a rather more heinous light.
This latest lawsuit also seeks an injunction against the pair to prohibit them from continuing these violations of copyright protection laws. According to the plaintiffs YouTube has a “deliberate” strategy to facilitate copyright infringement. This is not the hardest sell in the legal world in my view as it is pretty obvious that YouTube's biggest asset was “unique” user generated media at the onset.
According to the claims, Google was aware of this pattern before they bought YouTube and in the weeks that followed the buyout they realized about $4 billion in market capitalization. The most significant aspect of this suit and the most detrimental for Google/YouTube is the class-action status Premier League is seeking. In a class action lawsuit, literally hundreds of plaintiffs could seek remedy.
Trends and Meaning
We all love video and our proximity to it. There is one thing that we should always remember however, and that is the rights of the individual be it a person or a company. Google and YouTube do not have the right to use YOUR property without your permission. Well, what is use? I don't think we need to go into a dissection of the term more than to say that “gain” can always be an indicator of use. If these companies or individuals can prove that Google substantially gained from the use of unlawfully gathered content, this will be a big step towards sealing the case. There are many factors and political issues to be considered. The law substantially operates on precedent in such deliberations, and politics obviously plays a mostly hidden but no less crucial role in these cases.
The key terms in this news for me are class and action. A class action lawsuit carries with it an entirely different set of rules and implications. In a post about the Digg disaster over HD-DVD codes for copy protection and the enmity between Digg members and the MPAA Mashable left a tongue in cheek message about DRM meeting its match versus a single minded army of 1 million Digg users. I find this ironically timed for my little story and reminiscent of another small group versus a million single minded Persians a while back. This is almost Homeric in the pungent and synchronised way these events are unfolding lately.
The 300
I am visualizing a group of 300 artists, music companies, movie studios, amateur and professional video artists and their legion of allies in heated court discussion with a million 14-25 year old Diggers and YouTube enthusiasts in the gallery yelling: “we deserve it, we want, we can do what we want!” There is no universe I can think of where a U.S District Court Judge, given legal precedent, would rule against any group who had been infringed upon. What is more, I know none of you would want this to happen if it were your content. We are in effect talking about the total breakdown of the justice system if Google is proven wrong or gets past the court on a technicality. In class action cases a tie goes to the plaintiff versus any single corporate defendant, this is out of political and legal necessity both for the court and the law.
Ok, say I am wrong and Google is as pure as the driven snow. What people are doing is wholesale is stealing. No matter how you slice it if you use intellectual or artistic property without the consent of the owner it is theft. In a free market the creator establishes a value for a commodity and we have the choice to either buy it or not. The bottom line is there are ways to compensate people for their property without taking it and neither Google nor YouTube has demonstrated any desire to do so.
Web 2.0 and Us
Sooner or later this will all culminate in a crackdown. Many of us operate under a Creative Commons blanket of invulnerability. This is what I call “the nice guy” licensing agreement. It essentially makes rights more lenient in an effort to share under conditions material that is useful or desirable to the public domain. In a world where rampant misuse of protected property is no longer protected why would anyone tag their property with “some rights reserved” rather than all?
A million or 50 million anarchists are going to lose and be quelled by the forces of an organized society, otherwise absolutely nothing we perceive can be either safe or have worth. Our fear should be the opposite of what we perceive as out preference in this case. We want content and loads of it, but what are we prepared to sacrifice for it? This Google issue strikes at the core of Web 2.0. We are seeing a battle for the Web and billions of dollars in ad revenue and sales. We are also witnessing a shift towards Internet business and entertainment. Our goal should not be to steal what we want and the devil may care, but to influence undesirable business forces into fairness and innovation for a better Web.
Down the Tubes
Misuse of freedoms will potentially render the Internet useless for either business or education. Credibility and trust are at sake in perhaps the biggest game ever played. Somehow I do not feel comfortable being led into oblivion by a million people or 10 million bent on destroying the house they dwell in. The least disaster I see on the horizon is YouTube going down the tubes if someone does not catch hold of the reins.
Photo Credit: 300 from Wikipedia and Flushed from the movie site Flushed Away and Dreamworks
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to profy RSS feed!
Svetlana Gladkova
Lotusopal
Peet McKimmie 
65bus 
Irel Johnson
I agree with your opinion here. I think netizens have been spoiled by free content into thinking that they have an inherent right to get whatever they want whenever they want it. It’s certainly an easy state of mind to fall into. Copyrighted music and movie sharing on P2P networks is stealing and so is substantive re-use and gain from copyrighted content without the copyright-holder’s permission. I can’t strictly define “substanative” other than to say that showing a thumbnail image of a video wouldn’t be “substanative” but showing a certain amount of the video itself would be. Copyright holders get to make the call on if it’s fair use. Some might like the attention/marketing aspect of it, but some might not. Lately, not so much.
It seems that a site that simply aggregates links and information about videos on other sites in a user-centric way would be a smarter model than simply showing the videos directly. I assume those sites are out there. These sites can drive traffic to the copyright holders’ sites, which is what they want, and could provide the centralized hub that users want. Do we need to see it directly on the “hub” itself? Not really. Content sites just need to get their collective act together and create better, more user-centric sites while working with these hubs as much as possible.
YouTube should continue to aggregate user-generated content and video provided to them directly by copyright holders, but they need to get some common sense and quit acting like what they’re allowing on their site is something other than copyright infringement. Just because people want it doesn’t mean you should do it.
Thanks Mike! This is very insightful and correct. I don’t know what “substantive” quantifies out as either. I expect it would be a quantity determined by the content owner of some reasonable nature. The point is, the use should be determined by the creator of the art.
I know of just such an aggregation site that would be perfect as a hub and could even add ads to the suspect video for the content owners. many of the newer sites like Veoh do not have nearly as much “copyrighted” material on them as YouTube does.
Perhaps this won’t turn into a giant “content - copyright” war as I suggested, but at some point the big boys of music and TV?movies are going to exert some powerful lawyers into the equation. Once the courts get heavily involved, legislation will follow.
Personally it makes me sick to think that a singer or football player should receive millions of dollars when hard working people are responsible for the sanity of our world, what’s more content should be shareware. If you buy a cd and only like 2 tracks the rest is waste yet ask the artist if they are concerned that you spent your ‘hard-earned money’ on it…lol
Same goes for movies and football, even software programs, nobody wants a free ride but a sensible one needs to be sought, stop those who are making millions and put them on a minimum wage see how much they really like being an artist