Viacom sues Youtube

[A Black Falcon]

No matter whether Viacom is planning to use this just to see whether people are watching lots of their content or not, on principle this should be considered as a very bad precedent if it goes through... though I can understand their frustration. That law that says that you've got to tell them to take the content down instead of just banning everything sure is inconvenient for them, isn't it... it's one of the very few parts of the DMCA that isn't totally awful.

This bit of prying also doesn't really seem to do much to establish Youtube being "at fault" for what it's users post. It's a free system, and what they seem to be suggesting is that far more stringent check policies be put in place. What sort of system would they use that isn't very easily circumvented? Descriptions can easily be lies, and if they were forced to check each and every video posted, it would take forever for anything to get posted in the swarm until eventually people just stopped going, killing the service and all others like it in time. For the sake of Viacom they intend to kill all other markets? Yes, copyright must be protected but not by sacrificing someone else's rights to do it. There are limits. Copyright is a concept I stand behind, but only to a limited extent. To take copyright to it's ultimate extreme, nothing new could ever be created again. Without it, it's bad, but taken to an extreme is even worse. As such, copyright law must be tempered closer to the "free" end, even if it means someone can't make money off concepts like, say, odors or styles of gameplay, and even if it means the existance of a thing like Youtube must be allowed even if many of it's users violate copyright laws.

Indeed.

However, it is true that the whole copyright issue is an important one. The internet has fundamentally changed the world and we really don't know how to react to that yet... we don't have the answers now. Everything can't be free, as people need some kind of compensation for their work as long as we live in a capitalist society... yet why pay when it's available free and when the free version is easier to find and use, and why put so much effort into enforcement when it's all broken or ignored so easily? Very challenging issues.

Whatever you think on that, though, I think it should be pretty clear that the current "kill it all and shut it down and sue" answer is a really bad one. But what is the right answer... that's much harder.