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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."
Great interpretation of how just the law is from someone who obviously profits from it.
And, as I said... you don't create, so you don't understand. So I'll break it down for you...
My contribution to culture, however small, was done because I had the expectation of being able to trade that contribution for enough money to pay my rent, feed my kids, etc. If there was no expectation, you know what I would have done? Become a lawyer.
The long hours, sweat, and money I have put into creating art and paying others to create art... gone. The hours, sweat, and money thousands like me put into it... gone. The only reason you have as much content to copy, particularly good content to copy, is because copyright encouraged others to create it.
We have a right to be free.
One which was only secured for you by good people who made great sacrifices. And furthermore, freedom is not absolute. Your freedom is limited at the point where it stops someone else from being free.
We have a right to copy.
No, you have an ability to copy. You only have a right to copy something you PAID for and then only to copy it for personal use. Proclaiming a right to any copying that goes beyond that is like me saying I have a right to steal your car merely because it's stealable.
Slave owners quoted the bible to prove they had a "right" to own slaves. There are people who think their rights as parents extend to beating their kids unconscious and that the government arresting them for breaking a four-year-old's arm is a violation of their rights.
You can proclaim all the "rights" you want. That doesn't mean they're legal, ethical, or moral.
We no longer want these laws.
There are people in Germany who no longer want laws prohibiting the Nazi party. There are CEOs who no longer want laws prohibiting insider trading. There are pedophiles who no longer want laws prohibiting the possession or distribution of child pornography.
The dislike of a law doesn't make it unjust, just inconvenient to criminally-minded people like yourself.
Our numbers are growing.
Sadly, so are the numbers of Nazis, corrupt CEOs, and pedophiles. But growing numbers doesn't make be accept their causes, arguments, or criminal behavior, nor will they make me accept yours.
Start a happiness pandemic
https://cat2.dynu.ca/cat2/media.html
I take long hours to make content too.
I GPL it.
Your point is refuted.
Not all of us love money.
Death To women's Rights.
Wow. You just equated nazi-supporters, slave owners, corrupt CEOs, and pedophiles with opposition to the artificial, citizen-granted monopoly of copyright! Why in heaven's name is your tripe cited insightful? You're a damn bloody fool.
> My contribution to culture, however small, was done because I had the expectation of being able to trade that contribution for enough money to pay my rent, feed my kids, etc. If there was no expectation, you know what I would have done? Become a lawyer.
And mine was not. Is it less valuable? You do realize that there are other ways to make money from works of art and imagination (not mere "content" one might stuff into a box with a price tag), no? Or that something called the Renaissance happened outside the domain of copyright, no? You DO also realize that essentially ALL of your ideas are based on those of others, too, no? Otherwise, you'd have to write using only those words you had coined yourself. After all, while human thought, like water, originally shapes its own riverbed, ever after it flows down and is shaped by the same riverbed it first formed.
> One which was only secured for you by good people who made great sacrifices. And furthermore, freedom is not absolute. Your freedom is limited at the point where it stops someone else from being free.
Indeed. And when the only way to properly enforce copyright is to invade everyone's privacy and give some small group ultimate authority over everyone's PC, should not their right give way, particularly when it was a right created for the good of society?
> Slave owners quoted the bible to prove they had a "right" to own slaves. There are people who think their rights as parents extend to beating their kids unconscious and that the government arresting them for breaking a four-year-old's arm is a violation of their rights.
And ignored their obligation to free them all every 7th year during the Year of Jubilee, ignored that a "slave" was one who originally sold themselves (or was, alas, sold by their parents), not to mention a whole host of other limitations they found inconvenient. It's right that too often we see a right touted without ANY consideration for what gives rise to it, however. And here the point was NOT to give authors a right to profit, but instead to enrich culture. A goal that is almost if not entirely ignored by current copyright laws.
> You can proclaim all the "rights" you want. That doesn't mean they're legal, ethical, or moral.
Quite right. Copyright, as it exists now, can only rightfully be considered one of those three. It's no wonder then, that disrespect for it is continually mounting and will continue to mount until such time as the laws reflect something more real.
> There are people in Germany who no longer want laws prohibiting the Nazi party. There are CEOs who no longer want laws prohibiting insider trading. There are pedophiles who no longer want laws prohibiting the possession or distribution of child pornography.
Surely you know that by equating copyright infringement to Nazis and molesting children, you have long since undermined whatever point you were trying to make by abandoning reason wholesale in an attempt to demonize the opposition? Can you honestly find no better reasons to support copyright than "think of the children"? Yes, perhaps I am being glib with your response, but I cannot rightfully apprehend the sort of confusion that would prompt such an untoward comparison.
> Sadly, so are the numbers of Nazis, corrupt CEOs, and pedophiles. But growing numbers doesn't make be accept their causes, arguments, or criminal behavior, nor will they make me accept yours.
They are? Based on what do you suppose that these numbers are growing?
Now then, you say indeed that ad populum does not make a good moral system. I can agree with that, but the moral basis I use can only consider copyright infringement evil if it is ultimately hurtful to society. I do not find evidence of that, therefore I wish to see the law reformed into something which is good for society. Alas, I am not holding my breath.
But who am I kidding? You went to Godwin this discussion. I have to believe that you're just trolling, because you appeal only to emotion and not to reason.
The copyright act allows fair usage. This was interpreted in the past as an excerpt. One could for instance quote and attribute a passage from a book and this could even include pictures. To do so is not copyright infringement. A for instance of this is a critic or a book report. I would think a film trailer would fall into this category as well.
Dawns the Digital age and networks. Say one places one frame of a football game in each of millions of networked computers. Each frame can be noted as a quote and have proper attribution. Each frame can have an index number... say seconds into the game.
A cleaver app could simply download each frame individually from all the separate machines not as a torrent as currently defined... much more grainy. And said cleaver app could use the attribution information to stitch the game right back together. By doing so one would stay within the current legal interpretation of fair usage and at the same time totally subvert the copyright.
This would be no different than downloading a book where each character comes from a separate source. While this might sound screwy... the thing is it can be done and if legal it subverts copyright. But who is to say that 10 million people cannot excerpt from a published copyrighted work separate overlapping or non-overlapping segments? This would be like assigning a book review to a class and then if two students happen to excerpt the same passage or at least some of it - claiming they colluded and hence are guilty of copyright infringement. I think in a court of law one would have to charge a significant portion of the alleged perpetrators.
Then the question might be asked: Would it be legal to download all book reports and look at all excerpts and attempt to do an analysis of the amount of overlap and the distribution of the excepts over the entire book? In order to do this one would need to stitch the book back together from its pieces. I'm sure there is code to do this. I happen to know a chap who stitched the files off his hard drive back together using this technique after the partition resize was botched.
But let me ask... if we are talking about text as in a book then would it be copyright infringement if all of the letter "A"'s come from a small group of machines? What if one machine is programmed to hold only the 1st word or 1st letter of many different works and perhaps is programmed to do a statistical analysis of the usage frequency in position #1 across many types of books each identified by a book reference ID and a list of tags one might like to analyse over. Sound hookey or contrived? Of course. But is it legal research?
This ends up being nothing more than a linked list structure and it can be indexed and thus downloaded in parallel. Perhaps this is how torrents are put together.
The thing is that if _any_ excerpt is legal then everything in the area if infringement becomes increasingly gray as the sophistication increases. Well with Major Exceptions... the law also looks at the PURPOSE in mind. One can excerpt for a book report because the purpose of the excerpt is to support the book report. If 1 million people each write a book report and each use a different excerpt and their ultimate purpose is to subvert the authors copyright then the courts I think would find them guilty of infringement. However if 1 million people write a book report and have no intention of being able to put humpty dumpty back together again then they would not be guilty of infringement.
But what if Cleaver Programmer comes along and realises he can download all these said book reports and from them reconstruct humpty dumpty. Then is Cleaver Programmer guilty of infringement? Its a gray area. In a way yes. In a way no. Cleaver Programmer may for instance legally purchase the material and stitch it back together to illustrate it can be done. That would constitute Fair Usage. Cleaver Programmer for instance might be working on a PhD thesis on reconstruction technigues.
If there's no legal way for me to watch this, of course I'm going to turn to YouTube. And clips of soccer only encourages it across America, I have purchases two soccer replica jerseys (solid pocket money going to the Premiership and Serie A there)
Creation? Innovation? It's a frigging football (soccer) match! It's not like the FA is a bunch of artists writing poems or whatever, it's a sport.
It's not being streamed live in competition with the live broadcast.
Football is an important part of a large part of the world's culture. It is unjust to lock it up behind copyright, that just doesn't make sense. Making it available after the fact doesn't diminish the advertising revenue (that's what this is about, revenue) of the live broadcast, there's plenty of demand for the live broadcast.
But once the match has been played, what's the problem with people being able to watch it?
This is a good example of the bad side of copyright, locking up public culture for fear of losing even a penny of corporate profit.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
There is a big problem for them, though. They don't have any interest to provide their 'content' for free, they want to earn money. But honestly would you pay for something of the quality of YouTube? I fear most people would want to get a better quality, if they have to pay for it. I seriously doubt that they are willing to go for advertising supported distribution, because of the hard to calculate revenue.
And that gets them into this problem, the net was for very long not able to deliever high quality video streams (and perhaps it still isn't when a lot of people want to watch it). And I don't see any way for them to compete with YouTube, if they deliever that low quality people will (rightfully) ask why they should pay, if they deliever high quality they get into serious problems of where to get the bandwidth and how to pay for it.
So I can see, that for them the only way is to make sure, that their content has a high enough value to either make it possible to sell it to YouTube or to at least make a lot of money by selling to the traditional channels.
For your information, here in Germany the DFL (German Football Leage) who has the rights and sells them last time also sold separate rights for delievery via IP and mobile phone and you can bet, that the owner of the rights will sue anyone 'broadcasting' it for free.
Copyrights infringement is a serious issue. This is what any sensible person will agree on. But the amount which is being sought is way out of touch with reality. The court will decide the merits of this case and if found guilty, how much YouTube has to pay. Hopefully, YouTube will learn a lesson from all this and avoid it from happening in the future. Mscsrrr, http://www.google.com/bookmarks/?hl=en&zx=5869