The battle for badness rages …
From Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing:
Viacom did a general search on YouTube for any term related to any of its shows [eg all those Jon Stewart clips] , and then spammed YouTube with 100,000 DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] take-down notices alleging that all of these clips infringed its copyright and demanding that they be censored off the Internet. YouTube made thousands of clips vanish, and sent warning notices to the people who’d posted them, warning them that they were now on a list of potential copyright infringers and telling them that repeat offenses could lead to having their accounts terminated.
This is shockingly bad behaviour on the part of both Viacom and Google, YouTube’s owner. Viacom’s indiscriminate spamigation is incredibly negligent and evil. … But Google’s lawyers should have known better, too … [Google should] sue the living shit out of Viacom. … They’d change the landscape so that DMCA notices were only used by people who were genuinely being ripped off, and not firehosed by idiots to every site that matches a search-term.
So, Viacom’s spamigation is bad and Google could do something about this. But is Google not evil too? Is it not bullying all copyright owners?
Gootube has taken the arrogant position with big media that “You can’t stop us. You can’t stop people from uploading your copyrighted materials and if you want us to, you have to do a deal with us”. With the little copyright owner who feels their work has been illegally hosted on Google Video they simply try to intimidate them.
Here is the ultimate challenge. Everyone should upload their personal porn collection to Youtube and see what happens. … What better way to call bullshit on Google.
Remember, its not about how they treat Viacom. VIacom is big enough to take care of itself. It is about hiding behind a law, the DMCA, at the expense of copyright owners, to dominate the online video space.
It’s all very well for Google to assert its right to copy what it believes it has a right to copy (eg fair use of in-copyright book content for Google Book Search), but to assert it has a right to publish anything – up to and including full-length feature films – because it can’t be bothered to check whether it infringes copyright is another matter altogether.
It’s a strange and changing sandpit a massive online media distribution website is faced with. The big issue GooTube are facing is if they do make it hard to upload copyrighted material, those users will just go to another website to do so – since consumers are quite fickle.
I haven’t even bothered to search for another website doing this, but I will guarantee there is another one. Then what happens when http://www.not-that-tube.com.ru is taken down? People jump to a different company http://www.really-we-are-not-them-tube.com.cn and they keep on doing what they were doing before.
It’s a shifting target as long as there are countries with lax copyright protection out there and a desire from consumers to have a nice easy way to watch whatever we want. What’s the answer? Let consumers do it, but do it in a quasi structured way with cheap pricing. From the sounds of it Viacom is doing a Joost thingo where users have to download an application and run it on their desktops. This goes against the grain which people want to move to.
Instead they should just have a “central” site which companies upload their material, people pay a subscription and the “profits” are just divied up by percentages of how much of each contributer a user was watching in a pay period. And no advertising.
I’m not sure what’s going in Google’s labs, but creating something like this would replace the need to even have a YouTube. People really don’t mind paying something reasonable to watch cool stuff – $100AUD per month would not be beyond the pricing for most people to watch whatever they want. And structured pricing models? $50 to just watch on the site/month and $100 to be able to download and watch offline.
One really nice benefit of this system would be that independent production houses could weigh in against the big boys – provided they make something decent to watch.
Oh yeah, and I’ve got to be able to watch it on my iPod/iRiver or whatever. Get back DRM, get back;)
I have come to the conclusion although this may come under the Digital Millenium Act, there is an issue on how this should be defined (as a broadcast or a pseudo Distribution technique such as p2p). I also think that Viacom may find it difficult to establish as a broadcast because of the structure of Youtube being similar to that of a social network. It will also be difficult because there is the need to use a search engine to find the video you want. This in turn has been decided on matters of policy in other jurisdictions as a result specific to a third party; to say otherwise would make all search engines liable for content that they produce and threaten the entire structure of the internet!