Slashdot Mirror
English Premier Football League Sues YouTube
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC is reporting that the English Premier Football League has launched a lawsuit against YouTube and its owner Google, claiming unspecified damages. The league is sitting on high-profile content valued at $5.4 billion over the next 3 years in a recent series of auctions. This will be the second major suit against YouTube since Google's purchase."
As a big soccer/football fan myself (forza juventus!) sometimes YouTube is the only way I can watch the premiership or international football games in the US. None of the major networks broadcast it, it's rarely if ever available on cable, and it's impossible to find games on the internet. Except YouTube, people often upload it in segments. Maybe if there was a way to watch it online for cheap (or ad-supported) we wouldn't have to resort to watching on YouTube...but as of now for 90%+ of Americans, that is the only way to watch.
Just rambling here but isn't it interesting, YouTube sits there for years without any major lawsuits that I remember and then a large multi million dollar company buys it and suddenly companies are suing it...makes you wonder if they're really that disturbed about their content or if they simply want a quick buck...
But, a little more on topic, YouTube's response is just silly, threatening the internet? Is this supposed to become the tech people's "Think of the Children" meme? No offense but if YouTube goes down the internet won't be affected at all. However the accusation is also silly, YouTube pushing football (non-American) in order to raise it's profile. YouTube needs a bigger profile? I mean, is there really any person with internet access for the last couple years, or who simply watches the news, who doesn't know about YouTube?
As for the copyright issues wasn't there some law that said that people posting to a site (text) were responsible for their posts, not the hosting company? I may be wrong about that but if there was such a law would not this fall under it?
Oh well, it's not like YouTube is going down...and even if it did everyone knows that something would come up to replace it...probably a site with less regard for copyright law...you can't stop people from sharing things by making it hard on the places where people share, all that does is make people go to the less reputable places and then you have an even harder time stopping them. Better to let them share on a site like YouTube, where the worst offenders can be stopped, rather than sending the traffic to a site that would make it impossible to stop anything like this.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
Well, it's not likely Google/YouTube stood up and said, "We'll fight this lawsuit with all we've got!" It more like they said, "Well, this may be a good partnership in disguise. Let's see if we can make some money from advertising from this lawsuit." Google is not the "fair-use savior" as some have claimed. It's a business. Its goal is to make companies see the potential advertising revenue in these short clips on YouTube (they are an advertising company). Google is not standing up for fair-use rights; it's seeking potential streams of income (EPFL) and making them see the way (to profit). To pretend anything else is foolish and naive...
-William Brendel
Copyright is not an unjust law. It exists to spur creation and innovation, and for a lot of artists, it's the only thing that allows them to afford to create the content you unjustly enjoy.
It is not a perfect law and it does get abused. The concept of a creator being able to exert some control over their creation so that they can profit from it and prevent its adulteration to a certain extent is not wrong. And without copyright, anyone could take a GPL'ed project, incorporate it into closed source products, and no one could say boo to them.
The concept of copyright is not only just, it is necessary. There are a lot of people who, if they didn't have copyright laws to protect their creations, wouldn't create them, either because those creations cost too much or simply because there was a more profitable use of their time. The dream of being rich and famous spurs a lot of artists, and while you might argue that the "true artists" would create anyway... how much less would they create when the only reward was personal satisfaction?
You're a fringe ideologue who probably creates nothing and is only looking for an excuse to commit intellectual gluttony on someone else's dime. If you created stuff and actually were good enough to have a hope of doing that for a living, you wouldn't try to take that hope away from others.
- Greh
Start a happiness pandemic
Sir, the problem is simple.
The *minute* you start to enforce a restriction on information in any way,
is the minute you start to limit free speech. Copyright is a restriction
on free speech, as is censorship. Don't agree? Witness the recent uprising
about a *number* being transmitted *AND SHUT UP*.
Should I point out the irony of you blabbering about free speech and then telling me to shut up, or would that limit your freedom of hypocrisy? It's amazing how many proponents of free speech only seem to believe that their speech should be free and tell their critics to "shut up".
Again, I'll point out that copyright law is not perfect and does get abused. I am not against copyright reform or the eradication of copyright abuse. But a lot of people participating in that uprising were protesting against an abuse of copyright law, not against the concept of copyright itself.
And furthermore, we limit free speech all the time. Ever heard of laws against incitement to riot, yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, municipal noise ordinances.... Even though you can go up on stage in a night club and say the word "fuck" over and over for 4 hours, and call it performance art, if you tried doing that over a bullhorn in front of an elementary school, I guarantee you that the cops could arrest you and that even the Supreme Court would uphold that arrest.
I value my free speech far more than I value my right to get paid.
Tell me that when you have no food or shelter and no money to pay for them.
Isn't after all, caveat emptor?
How does "let the buyer beware" have anything to do with free speech? "Caveat emptor" means you need to inspect something before you buy it, so you're not ripped off by false representations. It does, on the other hand, have a lot to do with your elected representatives who help create copyright law. I'd heartily endorse a "caveat emptor" policy on election day, no matter what your political leanings.
Repeal the libel, the slander, the dmca, the copyright, the patents.
Please reply to this post with your photo and your full, real name and address so I can plaster your neighborhood with posters about how you're a child rapist and a danger to all children in your neighborhood. If you truly believe in the repeal of slander and libel laws, and you're all about freedom of speech, you'll not only take no legal action, you won't even pull the posters down (because that would be censoring me). You'll just suffer through your neighbors throwing rocks through your windows as the price of your ideals.
Lawyers, go fuck yourselves. You create nothing but misery.
And when you get get tossed in a cell in Guantanamo, I want you to tell that to the lawyers who are trying to get the government to let you go and stop torturing you.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
The point is it is not your speech; it's someone else's that you have misappropriated. Your free to say what you want; you're not free to take someone else's commercial product and redistribute it.
What was once true, is no longer so