Lex Ferenda

From the Financial Times:

Jeff Zucker, on his first day as chief executive of NBC Universal, came out swinging at YouTube, accusing the online video site of failing to deploy its technology to protect the copyrighted materials of traditional media companies.

“YouTube needs to prove that it will implement its filtering technology across its online platform. It’s proven it can do it when it wants to,” Mr Zucker said, referring to the site’s controls to block pornography and hate speech. He added: “They have the capability. The question is whether they have the will.”

No Jeff, the real question is whether you’re going to follow Viacom’s lead (presumably including false allegations of copyright infringement)! And rolling out the porn’n'hate line is not going to work - even the already-missed Captain Copyright can’t convince teenagers uploading Simpsons clips that they are just a whisker away from making Naked Nazi videos (although Ian Brown notes that a Cap’n’s Lookalike has flown in).

Let us wait and see what Jeff does next.

(Thanks to Peter Black’s regular and brilliant Daily News Links at Freedom To Differ for tipping me off on some the stories mentioned in this post!)