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YouTube Removed 30,000 Japanese Videos from Site
Grooves writes "YouTube has been asked to remove almost 30,000 videos from their site, according to reports. The Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) found 29,549 videos on the site that had materials contained in them that where not authorized by rights holders. From the article, 'A spokesperson for that organization said that they were considering petitioning YouTube for a better screening process. Although YouTube is legally obligated to remove infringing material when notified, some copyright holders have expressed irritation at the notion that they need to police YouTube themselves.' Now that Google's is attached to the site, will events like this become more commonplace?"
That's really unfortunate. Some of those Japanese shows are hilarious, and watching videos from foreign shows is a great glimpse into another culture.
Please move along.
Meta will eat itself
And exactly whose job should that be?
As opposed to the print world, or the spoken world, where... They need to find and notify the authorities of copyright infringement.
I understand the feeling that 'I shouldn't need to do this' that brings up that statement. But it has always been the copyright holder's problem to identify infractions. YouTube is no different in that regard, besides that it brings a lot of creations together in one place.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
The power of copyright does not include forcing an obligation onto governments or common carriers to search or police the content. The power of copyright gives the owner a right to take down specific infringing works.
Every scribble, photo, sculpted shape or soundbite you create is copyrighted as soon as you create it. This goes for everybody within the copyright-abiding hemisphere, which obviously means that the number of copyrighted works outnumbers the population by a very large factor. Clearly, not all rights-holders are trying to enforce those rights against every transgression, thankfully. Grouse all you want, but if you own a copyright, you are the only party who should be obligated to do anything about it.
Some carriers might impose a licensing check before submissions can be completed, or they might impose occasional purges like this even without the copyright owners having to complain, but the vast majority of carriers do not (and should not) impose any such hurdle to allowing their users to publish. This is the central promise of public broadcasting and collaboration by network.
If every sheet of paper needed permission before it could hold an idea in ink, we would still be scratching words in the dirt and looking over our shoulders.
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"Japanese broadcast giant *NHK* was among those seeking the removal of materials."
It's a conspiracy!
As always they want to remove everything instead of thinking first. What kind of quality does YouTube have? Sh*t, everybody knows. Those videos should be classified as promotional material. Instead removing them, they should lower the resolution (as if there's need for it already) and audio quality (look previous brackets) and add some intro like 'If you want to see it in proper way - Buy It!'. That would be much better than removing it.
Best part is that this process can be easily automated so videos marked as copyrighted by MPIA or similar can be automatically 'copyright marked'. That would create a lot of revenue for artists and a lot of fun for ordinary people.
Shame that they cannot think in this way. Create - not destroy!
"an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
Google is not managed by idiots. If they are going to shell out $1.6B for a commodity (even it's only $1.6B in stock and not cold, hard, cash), you can bet there was some due diligence involved. If you look at similar previous businesses-- Napster is the best that comes to mind.. Napster raked in a bunch of VC cash for Sean Fanning, and then it went down the tubes, but this was mostly as a result of failing to forsee the legal problems they would encouter. Google, no doubt, has already forseen this, and probably has developed a very robust (and hopefully flexible.. since web 2.0 is in its infancy) business model. One major difference between YouTube and Napster is that Napster was virtually 100% copyrighted (pirated) content. YouTube is probably 50% pirated content, with the other 50% being unique content (vlogs, etc) from users more interested in social networking, and I suspect in some ways these are more "valuable" users to google (in that they surf more often, are more susceptible/amenable to ads, etc). Of the pirated content, I suspect around 25-50% of the rights-owners actually "care enough" to pursue the fact that it is being exhibited on the web without royalties to them. The remainer are cellphone camera bootlegs of concerts, people singing covers of their favorite songs, etc.
After about 30 seconds of brainstorming, I can imagine google will focus on the social networking users (I already see YouTube making huge headway against MySpace-- watching a video of someone on their profile gives LOADS more parsable clues about them than a few blurry "MySpace Angles" photos), and secondarily attempt to convince many copyright holders to PROMOTE their retail content on YouTube rather than just ask them to cease and desist. This promotion could come in the way of YouTube "premier access" videos or site area, driven by g-checkout (or whatever its name is), where users pay for individual access to videos (at $.05 a view for a 2 minute video? maybe..) or perhaps for a site-wide access on a monthly fee basis. Or this promotion could come in the way of simply trying to pursuade copyright holders to let heir heavily compressed 320x240 webvideo stay up, with blatant text links/banners to the official site or whatever. As someone who actually creates commercial video content (I make documentaries, but have directed other projects such as music videos, etc), this is a situation I am amenable to. I'd be fine with google showing excepts of my last couple of films (extreme sports stuff), with context links on the page to buy the DVD, or maybe to "jamster" type ringtone sites that sell my video ringtones (which I don't actually have, but funny story, a large distributor [rhymes with Barner Wrothers] approached us to distribute our latest film, and one of their executive's biggest sales pitches to us [this was around a yr ago] was doing video ringtones-- "they're going to be huge!"). Also, remember, even if YouTube can't turn a profit on its own, the data-mining possibilities are endess... let's say I use my YouTube account (i am logged in via cookie) to watch lots of Morrissey videos. Then I google search for "documentary." There is [hypothetically] a new documentary coming out about Morrissey's legal battles with former Smiths bandmates, and now google can serve me context ad content based on the context of not just what I searched for, but what google also know me to enjoy. The correlations that can be made by cross referencing this content are pretty friggin extensive. I am positive this hasn't escaped their attention.
So in short, yes, everyone (including the big G) saw this coming. Expect some cool adaptations soon, I do hope.
Sidenote: I think that there is probably an amazing documentary to be made about the goings-on inside google.. what it means to work on the campus, how google employees are treated differently than typical IT employees, how they foster innovation, how they continue to push the envelope of how to do business on the web, their expansion into china (and grappling wi
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
I wonder, did they prove they have rights to those 30,000 videos? Or they just sent a note to GooTube requiring them to remove the videos and GooTube just silently swallowed that?
Of course this happened. YouTube is the next Napster. Same centralized hosting of uploaded content, same business model, same excuses, same legal problems. YouTube is in a worse legal position than Napster. Napster just hosted the index. YouTube hosts the actual content.
YouTube could well be shut down by an injunction. That's what happened to Napster. "Napster is enjoined from copying or assisting or enabling or contributing to the copy or duplication of all copyrighted songs and musical compositions of which the plaintiffs hold rights." -- U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel.
As for it being the responsibility of the copyright holder to find the material, "Napster wrote the software; it's up to them to write software that will remove from users the ability to copy copyrighted material," -- Judge Patel
YouTube, like Napster, is a contributory infringer. "The district court determined that plaintiffs had demonstrated they would likely succeed in establishing that Napster has a direct financial interest in the infringing activity. We agree. Financial benefit exists where the availability of infringing material "acts as a 'draw' for customers." -- 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
I was amazed that Google bought YouTube. It was obvious they were buying into a huge litigation problem.