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.
A number of us have been saying for years that sooner or later people will stand up and refuse to obey unjust laws.
We've made the claim that copyright is just such an unjust law.
The last few years we've seen it actually happening. We dipped our toes in with music sharing, but it was too hot, so we went back to the shadows. The so-called Pirate Party grows stronger. Now there's YouTube/Google.
The silent majority of us ignore these laws. Now there's a vocal minority who are saying enough is enough.
I think this issue has finally come of age.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Better than dressing up like an ape cause you can't take a hit or two without padding and helmet.
Hang on, what the fuck, I'm participating in a conversation about football codes?
Who just typed that?
How we know is more important than what we know.
youtube has in the past responded to take downs without doing any fact checking and in this case it seems that the material would have been taken off immediately had they had such a notice- instead as far as I can tell the company just sued youtube without such notice. now aside from that, what is youtube being expected to do to prevent any and all copyrighted works from being submitted illegally? are they still working on that unique identification system? if so it hardly seems like they're intentionally profiting from the whole thing
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
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
If you squint really hard, you might actually be able to see a sport in between the commercials.
Google's got far too much invested in YouTube and way too much at stake overall to allow a steady stream of high profile, potentially extremely costly lawsuits to continue. So I bet they and their YouTube folks are working hard on a technical solution that would provide enough upfront screening/checking to drastically reduce the amount of copyrighted material that wound up posted on either YouTube or Google Video (which would strengthen their legal basis for defending against any lawsuits). They are also likely to redouble their efforts to strike marketing deals with all the major content providers to head things off at the pass as much as possible, and to of course find new ways to contribute to their bottom line. Should be very interesting to see how all this plays out.
if youtube doesn't pay up, they may receive a nasty head-butt.
Ah, soccer.
Where the advertisements kick a ball around.
> 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.
Google falls down holding its knee, his face looks like he is in agony. No wait, now hes up again 2 seconds later running at full speed.
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.
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.
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?
Why do you have to invade everyone's privacy and give some small group ultimate authority over everyone's PC? You accuse me of using extremes, then use them yourself.
Again, and for the last time... Copyright law is not perfect and gets abused. But you're going at it like if a concept is poorly implemented and gets abused, we should just chuck the whole thing instead of trying to fix it. You're looking at this as a black and white situation rather than one with shades of gray. A binary worldview is dangerous.
Do I think it sucks that WMA DRM music can't play on an iPod and AAC DRM music can't play on a non-iPod? Yes. Once you buy it, you should be able to play it on any player. But do I think the solution to that is to abolish copyright rather than abolishing DRM that limits fair use? No.
Do I think that once I've bought a movie on DVD, I should be able to back it up to a personal media server or another disc so when the original DVD I bought wears out or gets scratched, I can continue to enjoy the content I purchased? Of course. But should that be done via abolishing copyright altogether or abolishing stupid anti-copy protections? The latter.
When you abolish stupid copy protections and bad DRM, the potential for piracy goes up... and so should the penalty. But when you make it possible for people to actually enjoy the content they paid for, more people will pay for it.
My first post on this story was pointing out that the video content producers were approaching the problem of digital distribution with the same stupidity and narrow-mindedness that the music industry demonstrated as MP3 began to rise. Rather than respond to their customers with innovation, they responded with draconian measures to try to stifle innovation. And that creates binary thinkers like you, so pissed off about the draconian measures that they rail against the concept of copyright instead of railing against the poor implementation of the concept that allows the draconian measures.
There is a middle-ground. Copyright is not bad in and of itself. It is the current state of copyright law that is bad. That state needs to be changed. But if your method of changing it is to destroy it, you create an environment in which those who agree with you on many points must end up opposing you, because if you make this an argument with only two sides, you make it a choice of the lesser of two evils. And at least for me, anarchy is always the greater evil.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Real Men(tm) play Aussie Rules.
The NHL has its own channel on youtube, showing highlights of games, the top plays of the week and so forth.
There are lots of highlight videos from other sources as well, but no/ very few full games like there are for the premiership. Is there a link? Quite probably - why sit through a low-quality version of the full game when you can just as easily see all the interesting parts in the same quality much quicker?
The football authorities certainly aren't known for using a light touch on copyright matters. They shut down hundreds of fansites every year for the heinous crime of listing their team's fixtures for the coming season (http://www.zoopus.com/?page_id=13). Use of such highly privileged information as your team's upcoming opponents is £258 plus tax per team per season.
Ah, Slashdot.
Where the ball kicks you.
Apparently.
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
The mistake they make is thinking that the man who takes a dive is being a sissy, as opposed to being a cheating bastard. De facto part of the game it may be, but I'm always delighted when the referee actually calls people on this one; to see a notorious diver actually get booked for simulation once in a while is a wonderful thing.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.