June 20, 2007
SueTube: sex, copyright, and rock & roll
Ars technica on how YouTube became a massive lawsuit electromagnet, attracting legal challenges from across the country and around the world.
"Popular video sharing site YouTube managed to avoid getting into big trouble in its early days. Perhaps due in part to the concept's newness at the time, various entities simply didn't seem interested in dealing with YouTube.
But Google's acquisition of the company changed all that. It was as though a switch was flipped: Google's deep pockets and YouTube's increasing popularity meant that not only were more videos of everything imaginable being uploaded, but taking action against the service might actually show some results.
... Is there an answer to the moving target problem that seems to get YouTube into so much legal trouble? A popular solution proposed by content providers like Viacom is a content filtering system. But YouTube continues to insist that such a system would not be a magic bullet, potentially targeting too many videos—such as parodies and legitimate clips that fall under fair use—or too few videos because of inaccuracies in labeling and tagging.
That said, the company has said that it is looking into filtering solutions that will make everyone happy and has more recently said that it is making progress, although no deals have been struck yet.
Video sites have a strong incentive to make content providers happy in order to license content from them in the future, and YouTube is no exception.
... A legal defeat for YouTube could result in fundamental changes to its business, potentially even making it commercially impossible to embrace user-generated content without first 'clearing' every video. ... And affect the legal landscape of the entire Internet."
Read on. Image from Techshout
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