YouTube AntiPiracy Policy Likened to 'Mafia Shakedown'

A C|Net article discusses reactions to YouTube's newly proposed antipiracy software policy. The company is now offering assistance for IP holders, allowing them to keep track of their content on the YouTube service ... if they sign up with the company for licensing agreements. A spokesman for Viacom (already in a fight with YouTube to take down numerous video clips) called this policy 'unacceptable', and another industry analyst likened it to a 'mafia shakedown.' YouTubes cites the challenges of determining ownership of a given video clip as the reason for this policy, and hopes that IP owners will cooperate in resolving these issues. Some onlookers also feel that these protestations are simply saber-rattling before an eventual deal: "'The debates are about negotiations more than anything else--who's going to pay whom and how much,' said Saul Berman, IBM's global media and entertainment strategy leader."

Comments

Tilting at windmills

[Buran]

Every time I see a story like this, it just upsets me. It's going against our culture, which values sharing and building upon others' work, and making use of what we already have to create new things. What's the point of this? It's just tilting at windmills -- those values are so ingrained in us that they're not going to go away.

Re:Tilting at windmills

[PhysicsPhil]

Every time I see a story like this, it just upsets me. It's going against our culture, which values sharing and building upon others' work, and making use of what we already have to create new things. What's the point of this? It's just tilting at windmills -- those values are so ingrained in us that they're not going to go away.

I agree with you, but if you log on to YouTube many uploads there are nothing more than TV broadcasts stripped of commercials. Uploaders aren't creating anything, they're just engaging in copyright infringement. I think copyright laws need to be a little more relaxed about "clip-and-snip", where people genuinely create something new by piecing together other (copyrighted) stuff, but I have no patience with people whose idea of "sharing" is just wholesale redistribution of copyrighted material.

Re:Tilting at windmills

[jfengel]

Another important feature of our culture is property rights: the idea that you can get rich by being smart in what you own. Laws ensure that if others want to use what they own they have to pay you, and because you're certain of that you'll invest in making and acquiring stuff. It's the essence of capitalism, and that investment in both intellectual and physical resources makes people rich.

The term "intellectual property" incorporates both aspects of the culture and gets to the crux of the conflict: we share our intellect but do not share our property. But as intellectual property can be shared without rivalry, the process is upended.

That's the answer to your question "What's the point?" We have two traditions in our culture: building on each other's work, and owning (and getting rich from) property. The easy sharing of information brings those two cultural values into conflict.

Those who claim that the argument has already been settled in favor of sharing over property are (IMO) missing the fact that property has always been a crucial driver of innovation and investment. Many intellectual things are expensive to create, movies most obvious among them, because they incorporate physical elements (sets, cameras, lights) before they become mere bits to be shared. The movie industry continues to believe that they can make money off their "intellectual property" on the basis of selling it like traditional property. If you manage to convince them that they're wrong, it's more likely that they'll stop making movies than that they'll produce them and expect to be unable to recoup their expenses.

The conflict of the two values will eventually produce a shift to a new order, and I don't know what that's going to look like.

Re:Tilting at windmills

[FLEB]

Building upon != simply reposting

Re:Tilting at windmills

[neax]

I guess the confusion here lies in the distinction between physically property and intellectual property. Is is really fair that someone can have exclusive rights to an 'idea' or should they just just be able to make money out of the application of this idea? Copyrights inhibit growth. They discourage people from reusing good ideas and building on top of them. They encourage people to rebuild their own type of wheel. so where does this fit with IP? People need to be able to make money out of the work that they do, but perhaps the current system is flawed. No matter how much they fight piracy and sharing it will always exist, it is the nature of humans to share things. "hey John have you heard this great new album by band X? its great, ..no.... you can't listen to mine go buy your own".

There will always be free riders looking for a free lunch.....as i have been in the past...and sometimes i still am. But i believe that ultimatley it is only good for the artist / producer or whatever it is that is getting ripped off. If you were a band, that made an album or a video clip, would you rather sell 10,000 albums and have 10,000 fans with no one sharing your material, or sell 10,000 albums and have them sharing your work and have 1 million fans? what is better for your music and your future in the industry? I think that being know and getting noticed counts more than actual sales. It will always eventually lead back to sales, ticket sales for concerts etc. Even if only 5,000 people bought the album because the rest copied it, if they share it they are promoting your band which is basically free marketing. That will always lead to sales.

Re:Tilting at windmills

[jfengel]

There are several different kinds of intellectual property. The closest thing to owning an "idea" is a patent, not a copyright. Patents are a whole different story; the idea is dubious, and the US patent office implementation of that idea is criminally negligent.

Copyright is owning a particular work: a book, a song, a recording of a song, a movie. And you need to be very careful about making up your numbers here. It's very simple: I'd rather have 10k fans buy 10k albums than have 1,000k fans buy 5k albums. If the word-of-mouth advertising is so great, why did I sell half as many albums?

Especially given the first thousand albums just go to the cost of recording. Studio time is expensive. Engineers are expensive. Mastering is expensive. Album art costs money, screen printing CDs costs money. And getting those first 10k fans to buy any copies of the album at all is expensive. Put an album out there on the web for free and nobody will download it until you play a few hundred gigs in which your money for the night MAYBE covers the gasoline it took to get there. (And god forbid the drummer should have a few beers.)

Why yes, I have been a rock band promoter, and I do know where these numbers come from. If I want to PAY the band, God forbid, I have to sell 10k albums.

Most of the things that are downloaded are things that somebody spent a LOT of money promoting in the first place. Most bands of the kind I've worked with would pay you to download their album.

There's a lot to be said for developing new models; DRM is simply holding back the ocean with a broom. But I implore you, when justifying your downloading to yourself, not to pretend that you're somehow doing the band a service until you've looked at the economics a lot more closely.

Re:Tilting at windmills

[balloonhead]

Yes, your figures make sense. But why do unproven bands have money chucked at them (though not in their pockets) for tone-sided deals anyway? The recording time, engineering, mixing etc. don't have to be so expensive when they are essentially an unknown quantity. The fact that there is a large (and growing) number of bedroom sound engineers attests to the fact that, although the quality may not be quite up to the same standard, it can get pretty close - close enough that sales don't suffer (e.g. Daniel Bedingfield's 'Gotta get thru this', recorded in his bedroom with a PC and a microphone).

Technology and the internet have shown a few things in the last few years with regard to music:
1. It can be produced much more cheaply (for close to the same quality in some but not all cases)
2. It can be distributed much more cheaply
3. People are still willing to pay an inflated amount for it if that amount is low (iTunes - $1 a track or thereabouts is probably more than each individual track is worth but such a low price point that people still will pay it)

There is still a place for expensive studios and expensive staff and even expensive marketing - but not at some up and coming band that might turn out to be a one-hit wonder who gets the arse end of the bargain with a record company and ends up in servitude for it.

Re:Tilting at windmills

[esme]

Those who claim that the argument has already been settled in favor of sharing over property are (IMO) missing the fact that property has always been a crucial driver of innovation and investment.

This isn't actually true. Our system of copyright is rather new, as the idea is only about as old as our country. Large scale works (opera, architecture, large paintings, manuscripts, etc. in those days) existed for centuries before copyright was invented.

The old system relied on patronage. People with money and power supplied the capital needed for large projects, and hence called the shots on their production. I think this system could be resurrected pretty easily, since there are already a number of government and non-profit organizations that fund film and television productions now. I don't know if we'd ever have patronage-funded $100M-budget blockbusters, but I'm not sure that's an argument against the system.

Also, and more broadly, our experiment with copyright started with a 14-year term. Given that the last works to enter the public domain were produced before my grand-parents were born, I think we've effectively established infinite copyright terms at this point. So I think the media conglomerates have effectively forfeited any moral right to copyright they may have had by stealing the public domain from us. After all, the enrichment of the public domain is the only excuse for giving creators a temporary monopoly in the first place.

-Esme

Microsoft

[BGatesFan]

I don't like YouTube because it doesn't Digitally Manage My Rights. I'd prefer YouTube if I had to do some sort of verification before watching every movie. This verification would ensure that I am using my Dell PC Solution running Windows Vista. Hopefully Microsoft will buy YouTube so that you'll only be able to access it using Internet Explorer 7/Windows Vista.

Dude, You're Getting a Dell!

So they bemoan having to pay for their enforcement

[plasmacutter]

Funny, everyone else has to pay for their own enforcement.

The public has to pay for police work in taxes, the government has to pay employees for studies, every major corporation has to pay their security guards and in most cases security system contractors to keep their buildings secure.

The media industries should be no different. If they want others to be looking out for their interests, they should be paying those people for their troubles.

Re:Doesn't YouTube know

[tomhudson]

Tony Soprano called ... he wants the media companies to know they're infringing on his "Intellectual Property" when they use his tactics ... a couple of the boys will be by later to discuss how they can "purchase protection" or "insurance" ... you knw ... "would be a real shame if something bad were to happen ..."

Irony?

[Phil246]

Irony : Media companies complaining about mafia-like tactics.
Or is it hipocracy?

So let me get this right?

[zappepcs]

YouTube is arguably one of the largest video sites on the Internet and people are upset when they want to charge for the service of policing the world's multimedia efforts?

Sure, they host them, and perhaps can or do check them, but the law doesn't say that people need to check for IP rights before using something (IIRC) and that it is the IP holder's job to request the violator change their use of the IP or take it down.

If YouTube did this free, they would become IP policemen, and that can't be cheap. Why wouldn't they charge for this service? To me, this doesn't sound like mafia tactics so much as it sounds like business tactics. Offer a service and charge for it. I am thinking that Google et al haven't figured out how to generate ad revenue from this service so they want to charge for it.

Sounds like simple business practice to me. I might be wrong though.

Re:So let me get this right?

[Nicholas Evans]

Unfortunately, copyright law is not that simple. YouTube is a 'safe harbour' under the DMCA 512(c). 512(c) is a magical section of the law that grants an online service provider which hosts content from users on their own servers immunity from IP infringement provided that they meet certain criteria.

To summarize, YouTube has to designate an agent to receive notice of infringement, publish their copyright infringement policies, disable access to repeat offenders, and respond reasonably to takedown / counter notices.

So just as long as they're processing those DMCA takedowns and tossing users out, the DMCA (in theory) shields them from litigation. So, eh, surprisingly, this is copyright law.

Disclaimer: IANAL. Go read copyright.gov/onlinesp/ or ChillingEffects.

Re:So let me get this right?

[stubear]

Safe Harbors are not for online service providers, they are for internet service providers. It is a way to protect ISPs from being sued for the content they host. YouTube is not an ISP, they provide a place to store videos, not host connections. If YouTube was protected by the Safe Harbor loophope in the DMCA then anyone could also make the same claim and distribute intellectual property to their heart's content.

Re:So let me get this right?

[makomk]

Safe Harbors are not for online service providers, they are for internet service providers. It is a way to protect ISPs from being sued for the content they host. YouTube is not an ISP, they provide a place to store videos, not host connections. If YouTube was protected by the Safe Harbor loophope in the DMCA then anyone could also make the same claim and distribute intellectual property to their heart's content. You do realise that if the Safe Harbour provisions don't protect YouTube, then by the same argument they also don't protect most web hosting providers (as well as picture hosting sites such as Photobucket, blogs, forums, etc), and they are equally vulnerable to being sued over content they host?

Screw YouTube...

[MsGeek]

...there are other places to post video. I hope they don't wind up the iTunes of online video.

A friend of mine's Daria fan animations (no they aren't hentai) got taken off of YouTube. Viacom has been approving of fan films in the past, the most elaborate of which being the Star Trek: The Original Series continuation "The New Voyages," hosted at http://www.newvoyages.com/ . The fan films got swept up in the Viacom/YouTube dragnet. This pissed me off because quite a few people from the Daria fandom were involved, and they really were nicely done.

Hopefully an appeal to have the fan films reinstated will be successful.

The screwed thing is that unless you take a lot of trouble with 3rd party apps you cannot download a YouTube .FLV. And the resulting file is pretty crappy looking no matter what you do, because .FLVs are so intensely compressed and lose so much in the lossy compression process. I mean WTF? Big Media is getting FREE PUBLICITY even with the copyrighted stuff. They are using YouTube as a promotional tool on the one hand, then on the other they are screwing the fans.

There are alternatives. Metacafe, Ning, Revver...all excellent choices for showing your stuff. And there is always BIT TORRENT for something a bit higher quality and a bit more permanent.

Big media needs to grow a brain. YouTube needs to grow a spine. Everyone wins when content is up on YouTube. Everyone loses when these silly fights start up.

Re:Screw YouTube...

[garcia]

...there are other places to post video. I hope they don't wind up the iTunes of online video.

They are going to become the Napster of online video... An awesome service when it was all free and full of pirated stuff. Now that it's going legal and making deals with the industry, it's probably going to suck.

Re:Screw YouTube...

[JoeRandomHacker]

The screwed thing is that unless you take a lot of trouble with 3rd party apps you cannot download a YouTube .FLV. [ ... ] The Fast Video Download plugin for Firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3590/ will grab your FLVs easily. I have no Flash plugin for my platform, so this plus mplayer is the only way I can watch the stuff.

Re:Screw YouTube...

[MsGeek]

There are easier ways to skin this particular feline, particularly on Mac OS X. I like VisualHub. Which reminds me, I gotta register my copy. Yes, I know you can use free commandline tools if you are uber-geeky. But VisualHub is the most Mac-like way to do it.

I got VisualHub to convert XviD/DivX material to DV so I could burn DVDs, but I noticed just recently that it can do .FLV as well.

If worst comes to worst, I'll put my stuff up on my own space.

Or more likely, with translation

[DrYak]

YouTubes cites the challenges of determining ownership of a given video clip as the reason for this policy, and hopes that IP owners will cooperate in resolving these issues.

Daring fire-style translation :

No, we won't let you just pipe the results of your auto-suit-bots into our database.
Identifying actual copyright infrigment, from fair use, from complete false-positive is a very difficult job and if we botch it, people are going to make fun of all of us including YouTube, like it hapened before with the tutorials. So please now pay for the actual work force needed to perform what you ask.

Re:So they bemoan having to pay for their enforcem

[Dysproxia]

The media industries should be no different. If they want others to be looking out for their interests, they should be paying those people for their troubles.

The owner of a copyrighted video is not and should not be obligated to make deals with every damn video sharing site just for the priviledge of having that copyright honored. It's quite obvious that as long as it is illegal to host those videos without permission from the owner, the sharing sites are alone responsible for their "troubles".

Re:So they bemoan having to pay for their enforcem

[Ansoni-San]

You have no idea of what you're talking about. This isn't about Youtube charging people before they'll comply with the law. The law says the media companies have to name everything they want taken down (also if I remember correctly with links to the offending material).

The media companies want Youtube to do their work for them and blanketly take down any and all of their content because they don't want to have to search themselves.
The law doesn't legally allow for this kind of copyright enforcement so Youtube are saying
"There are lot of problems and work involved in this rediculous demand, so if we do help you we're sure as hell getting something in return"
which is a very big favour on Youtube's part since I doubt any deal would be worth much more to Youtube than the traffic the offending material would bring.
I think the point here is that Youtube have to show willingness to help so that the media companies don't have any legal leg to complain on whatsoever.
As long as Youtube isn't just ignoring the offending material but searching for it at a reasonable speed (reasonable being in comparison with the amount of manpower they can possible be expected to spare), then I can't see any problems a court could find with it.

YouTube is dead

[svunt]

Ever since Google put a huge bag of cash into YouTube, the content's been getting weaker and weaker, thanks to takedowns. It won't be long until all that's left are camwhores, idiots getting hurt & mentos/coke videos. You know, all that "person of the year" winning material.

Re:So they bemoan having to pay for their enforcem

[professionalfurryele]

Burglary is a criminal offence which the police exist to investigate, and the criminal justice system is designed to punish.

Copyright infringement is a civil offence, which includes different penalties, and different rules.

Repeat 100x

Copyright infringement != Burglary

The burden of preventing copyright infringement lies with the rights holder. They have certain actions they can compel others to take with regard to their copyrighted material, and legal recourse if those actions are not taken. This does not extend to bringing the full weight of the criminal justice system to bear against copyright infringers. This is fair because a copyright is not physical property, and copyright itself is a social contract between creators and the public. It is already very unfair on the public due to the Berne convention, and does not serve the purpose it was originally intended for (enriching the public domain). Are you suggesting it should be made more unfair?

Re:So they bemoan having to pay for their enforcem

[jrockway]

This is not at all what's happening. It's like after you've been burgled, you complain that you have to report the crime to the police and insurance company in order to get your stuff back. It's like expecting money to magically fall out of the sky for no reason -- not particularly realistic.

Culture of IP rights?

[tkrotchko]

Those have existed in their current form for about 15 years.

And I'll believe that copyrights and patents are "property" right around the time that they're taxed the way real property is taxed.

Until then, it's a load of crap.