Video sharing sites given a welcome reprieve via the US Courts

[Czar]

A quite astounding court ruling in a case between an adult video producer and popular video sharing site Veoh Networks (which, incidentally, no longer supports adult content) seems to have paved the way for all video sharing sites to breathe a collective sigh of relief.

Veoh was granted a ruling that effectively put the onus on copyright holders to notify the site of suspected breaches, rather than expecting Veoh staff to manually monitor the site's content to guard against the distribution of copyrighted material. This comes in the wake of several lawsuits against YouTube which, as anyone who has used the service will no doubt agree, is absolutely littered with unlicensed copyrighted content. This ruling seems to offer YouTube a strong layer of protection against future lawsuits, as long as they remove offending material after being notified by copyright holders.

It seems to give YouTube and other video aggregation sites the ability to plead ignorance if challenged over their content and to leave copyrighted material available until such time as they do receive a complaint (which could be indefinitely if the copyright holder is unable to track down their material in every corner of the web).

For more on this, see the following article:
http://www.internetnews.com/breaking...le.php/3768591

What do you think of this ruling? Do you agree that video sharing sites should be given the benefit of the doubt, while profiting from unlicensed copyrighted material, or should they be assigned some level of responsibility in actively filtering submissions to ensure that clips from popular movies and TV series don't find their way on to the sites, unless the producers of those programs are provided with a royalty kick-back?

[Nutri]

I have this to say about youtube, or any other video hosting site with a huge amount of data:

I think that if the issue is brought to YouTubes attention by a significant amount of people (not just one report, I'll say 10 reports from seperate IPs as a ball park figure but really I'm not sure), they should look into it. However if something has zero reports or less than whichever number is chosen (again, I'll say about 10) it shouldn't need to be looked at. The amount of man hours it would take for YouTube to go through all their videos and keep looking 24 hours a day would be so huge it's silly.

I'm sure there are a lot of differing opinions though

[falsealarm]

Makes absolute sense as companies like YouTube can not be expected to monitor hundreds of thousands of videos added everyday. Maybe YouTube needs to collaborate with the producers to come up with a digital watermark/recognition system so that copyrighted material is easily identified after upload.

[Czar]

YouTube did promise the Film & TV industry something very similar to what you suggested and actually stated that it would be in place by Christmas a couple of years ago. This was to be a highly advanced, tech-based system designed to automatically flag suspect copyrighted material.

Clearly, they never came through with this promise. Their failure to deliver on their own stated deadline accounts for part of the reason that several major sporting and media production organisations have attempted to sue the company.

[Nutri]

It's a shame they didn't develop on the idea, it could have saved a lot of hassle.

[rachit14nov]

wat exactly they want? i mean do dey want youtube to delete all the adult stuff?

[Czar]

Hi rachit. No, this decision is much more significant than that. The court basically found that YouTube can't be expected to police all of the content that is uploaded to the site and that copyright holders are responsible for alerting YouTube to breaches of their rights. Previously, courts often saw things the other way - and held the distributor liable for ensuring that copyright material is properly identified and licensed prior to distribution.

Without trying to oversimplify the decision, this effectively says that YouTube can display as much pirated material as it likes by claiming ignorance, until such time as the individual owners of each clip identify themselves as the rights holder and ask for the offending material to be removed.

[Czar]

The path forward may not be as carefree for YouTube as this case may have suggested. Media giant Viacom is continuing its assault on Google's video site after revealing internal emails from YouTube execs that apparently suggest the company's founders were not only aware of deliberate copyright infringement taking place on the site, but were actively encouraging the same.

Whether or not their claims are true will be up to a judge to decide. In the meantime, you can read more about Viacom's claims here:
http://www.internetnews.com/breaking...le.php/3871641

[nareshkush]

It's a shame they didn't develop on the idea, it could have saved a lot of hassle.
Makes absolute sense as companies like YouTube can not be expected to monitor hundreds of thousands of videos added everyday. Maybe YouTube needs to collaborate with the producers to come up with a digital watermark/recognition system so that copyrighted material is easily identified after upload.

[phamvanhoa7592]

I thik you make youtube and forum