The rise of the Internet
or the fall of Silvio Berlusconi? I'm not sure which.
A Madrid court has thrown out copyright infringement charges brought against YouTube by Spanish TV station Telecinco. The station, owned by Silvio Berlusconi, won a previous case against Google's video service in 2008. The court today dismissed charges and found it the responsibility of copyright owners to guard their own …
to police infringement on their own, here's the problem I'm left with:
If the company best known for it's computational indexing and search engines can't police infringement on a site they host, how is anybody else with resources magnitudes of orders less than Google supposed to do it?
Pint because maybe it will help me come up with an answer.
There IS the practical problem of looking through 500 million videos, but that is not the most important part.
If they could, how do they determine if the poster of the video had permission or not?
Just because something "professional looking" is there doesn't mean that it is there illegally.
This is especially relevant with the increase in "viral marketing" being used by marketing companies more and more. Was that "cute" commercial video posted by a savvy marketing department or ripped from the TV illegally by someone who just liked it?
Ultimately, only the copyright holder knows the answer.
"YouTube offers content owners tools to remove copyright infringing content and this means that it is the responsibility of the copyright owner – not YouTube – to identify and tell YouTube when infringing content is on its website"
This argument really is a blanket get-out-of-jail-free card for copyright infringement. The way it sounds, copyright owners apparently have to play whack-a-mole endlessly just to remove content that can be re-uploaded and re-indexed in seconds.
You could practically ignore copyright laws with your website as long as:
1) You offer a way for copyright owners to complain
2) You can claim you did not put it yourself
3) You have "too many users" to control what they upload
Good for us, but I can imagine copyright owners shaking their heads in disbelief.
I agree, this ruling is a loss for copyright holders due to the "whack-a-mole" result. If YouTube was more of a no-name, or little-known outlet (as there are many YouTube wanna-bes I'm sure), the copyright holder may not even be aware of the infringement, but still suffering losses or what-have-you because of it. It's only when it's be around the block in smaller channels so much that it makes its way out to the likes of YouTube that the holder even becomes aware of the infringement in the first place. It is a sad day when copyright holders, themselves, have to run a Google-esque indexing/searching spiderbot to sniff out their works on websites.
Quite honestly - so effin' what? Holding a copyright comes with responsibilities as well as rights. You have to police your own copyrights, and if that's too difficult and/or expensive, then maybe it's not worth keeping the copyright. Or at least not keeping it for the whole eternity-plus-a-billion-years that copyrights last these days.
They're right... It is a win for the internet. This sets a precedent in that country, and to a lesser extent, the world.
Copyright holders should be tracking their property - I saw this as someone who DOES have intellectual property, and HAS had to report a violation and ask for a takedown. It's not much fun to do, but why should I expect Google to do it when it's none of their business?