Subscribe Feed (RSS)Suing Gootube
March 13th, 2007 by Daithí | Filed under Cyberlaw, Media and Society.There are three sides to YouTube, really.
There’s the uploading of ‘user-generated content’ with little in the way of legal consequences. Films of cats falling asleep, self-composed piano pieces, recordings of the end-of-year speech at school, even ‘happy slapping’ etc. Setting aside incidental use of copyrighted materials (just for the current discussion), these aren’t very important to copyright lawyers - but are interesting to people like me doing research on media regulation and so on - how do you regulate for ‘obscenity’ with 50,000 filmmakers? Do we want to? And so on. When talk radio shows talk about the evils of YouTube, they normally mean this sort of stuff.
There’s the interesting, creative, remix culture - cutting up bits of Bush speeches to make it seem like he’s singing Sunday Bloody Sunday, kids lipsynching to pop songs. And so on. Of huge cultural significance, and posing a major challenge to the traditional legal understanding of things like derivative works, parody and so on. This doesn’t get the parents as worried, is strongly defended by Commons-types, and is probably ultimately solved by some sort of blanket licensing arrangement.
And then there’s the simple rip/capture/upload of TV shows, films, etc. Some of this is from the archives (people digitising old tapes of 80s music videos, etc). Some of it is very short (the 60 seconds on whatever bit of live TV where someone got it wrong). Some of it is even ‘official’ uploading by record companies and so on - getting the music video out there as a promotional tool. But a lot of it is simply recording this week’s episode of Lost, or the last DVD’s worth of the West Wing, and shoving it onto YouTube. It’s not UGC, and it’s not creative - it’s an easy-to-figure, Napster-like challenge to copyright, with a different technological approach (pseudo-streaming, but downloadable by tech-savvy users). Sometimes when I tell people that I’m interested in YouTube and the law, they (naturally) think I mean this sort of stuff. It’s not really my thing, but it’s probably the most prominent of the legal issues. And so we have today’s story.
Viacom v Gootube is on. Guardian, Slashdot, Lessig. Findlaw has the key document, which doesn’t tell us that much (although it does include a detailed list of alleged infringements, hopefully they actually checked them this time).
Popcorn, anyone?
Do you think Viacom will win the case?
I doubt it will get that far. I suspect Google would be quite happy for all the TV/DVD rip stuff to go away, as it (the obviously infringing content) is much less of a proportion of the whole than the similar content in the case of Napster, for example. If you took it all out, there’s enough other stuff within the GooTube universe to support the business model, I think. Also, after the Grokster case (Wiki has a summary), I don’t think there’s much of a willingness to challenge the broad principles of liability for this sort of copyright issue. There was a lot of commentary at the time of the Google/YouTube linkup about the amount of money set aside for legal stuff…so I’d imagine that all sides will come to an ‘agreement’ which will involve some measure of licensing for minor use, deletion of obvious violations and privileged positions for friendly content providers with copy protection. But that’s just a guess.
[...] A great animation of the original (created by a student for a Flash class - an example of what I called the second side of GooTube last week (here) [...]
[...] (which I have already discussed here) or Viacom’s suit against YouTube (discussed by Daithí here). Whatever about the merits of the individual cases, it is becoming increasingly clear that the the [...]