A friend of mine recently criticized YouTube for not doing more to discourage users from copyright infringement. He suggested, for example, that YouTube should allow other users to police each other for copyright infringement and send in complaints to YouTube (under the DMCA notice-and-takedown procedure, the copyright holder or agent must be the one complaining). Community policing is essentially what YouTube relies on for a whole host of inappropriate content to be flagged. Last week, members of Congress, Chad Hurley, and Mark Cuban had a similar debate (see below). Frankly, I thought the views on both sides were quite thoughtful (and far from the more combative accounts in the press).
What do you think about this or other ideas? This problem isn’t an easy one to solve (even putting aside the legal questions), so I’d love to hear your views.
May 22, 2007 at 1:55 pm |
With users policing each other about copyright the ‘fair use’ mantra will become a battle cry.
I like to point out now and then that ‘fair use’ is a specific legal defense not a license or an excuse.
That being said, I am willing to put stuff out there knowing that I have ‘far use’ to fall back on. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyneLr_zQRI
May 26, 2007 at 5:06 am |
I absolutely agree that YouTube should do a better job informing its users as to what it means to have permission to upload content onto its site. YouTube has always warned its users to only upload content for which they have the rights but has not explained exactly what that means. For example, many consumers have a hard time understanding that owning a compact disc or a legally downloaded digital song does not give them the right to put the song on a website or synch it to a video they make.
Recently MySpace added the following language to their copyright warning on music account sign up:
Even if you lawfully own a copy of the music (for example, you bought the CD or downloaded it from an internet service), this does not give you permission to upload the music to MySpace. If you violate this rule, your account may be deleted.
There is no similar language on YouTube. There should be.