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YouTube Can Be Liable For Copyright Infringing Videos, Court Rules (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: YouTube is known to be a breeding ground for creators. At the same time, however, it's also regularly used to share copyrighted material without permission. While copyright holders can issue takedown notices to remove infringing content, a preliminary ruling by the Commercial Court in Vienna has decided this is not sufficient. The ruling follows a complaint from local television channel Puls 4. After a thorough review of YouTube's functionalities, the Court concluded that YouTube has an obligation to prevent third parties from uploading infringing content. In its defense, YouTube argued that it's a neutral hosting provider under the provisions of the E-Commerce Act. As such, it should be shielded from direct liability for the actions of users. However, the Commercial Court disagreed, noting that YouTube takes several motivated actions to organize and optimize how videos are displayed. By doing so, it becomes more than a neutral hosting provider.
Venice Austria this time, not California
Google/Youtube has been documented as taking an active and proactive role in removing and suppressing videos that run against the inbred leftist bent of the SJWs that run the Google/Youtube operation.
Their argument of being a neutral hosting provider hasn't been true for a long time. It's about time they're held up to their responsibilities of being the curators of everything that's published on their web site. It was their decision to make, to advocate socialist positions, and suppress conservative viewpoints. It's good to see some court finally recognize that, and issue an appropriate ruling.
Firstly US law provides a shield for media companies which YouTube is compliant with.
Secondly foreign laws do not apply to US companies.
Frankly, I doubt that this has much chance of surviving the whole process including appeals.
And even if it does, all that would happen would be geoblocking of Austria by YouTube.
This ruling will never survive. Otherwise, Youtube and all other sites in the business of hosting user content will just block IPs from Europe. Of course, maybe that's the plan.
Make love, not reality television.
Imagine (... and some more crap)
Nope. It's the 21th and things changed. Get on with it.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
> 21th
Just some good old regulatory capture. Youtube builds its entire empire on copyright infringement (even admitting as such in emails that came out in a legal proceeding). Google buys them, which has tons of resources to police the site. Now, the law decides that copyright infringement shall be hit with a big fat hammer. RIP any competitors. Google and the big boys now own video on the Internet. Gonna be sweet when there's only 4 companies in that market, just like every other market in the USA. GDP is gonna soar, since ours is basically propped up by inefficiencies and monopolistic pricing everywhere. Checkmate, commies!
Doesn't Google directly benefit from this too? If they run ads on protected content that they profit from then Google has some real liability there with protected content. But then again, Google can't seem to protect its Android app store from rogue apps with malware so I have my doubts Google is capable of being copyright police with Youtube.
nope they changed ad sense it would be very hard to get enough subs on a channel that gets shutdown in a few hrs to make any money.
The moment youtube started arbitrating about what is and isn't allowed and which content is desirable they gave up their protection.
...block all of Austria from Youtube, Google, and any other Alphabet owned site.
Aren't rulings like this going to enable YouTube (Google) to allow more false positives which could end up enabling copyright trolls to demonetize legitimate content creators?
In the U.S. at least a copyright holder can notify Youtube and the service will pull the content. That's what the DMCA is all about. It shields Youtube and other service providers from just this kind of action.
I realize that its effect does not extend beyond U.S. territory. Likewise any ruling of law Austria might impose is not effective beyond it's own boarders (or perhaps the EU.)
Geoblocking is a thing. For that matter how much revenue does YouTube get from Austria compared to the cost of the almost impossible task of preventing users from uploading copyright material? If the cost is high enough pulling out of that market might be the better move.
The very *best* case scenario here if Austria gets what they are asking for is that this is going to result in entirely legal videos which might contain parody, satire, or commentary on copyrighted works being blocked from being viewed in Austria, as well as any other entirely original works that might happen to have some superficial similarity to a copyrighted work. It only goes downhill from there.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Truth is, if they are themselves liable for any copyrighted content, it would seem like every video uploaded would have to be vetted by every country in the world.
The takedown notices used now are not perfect, but they allow YouTube to exist. And is a county decides that is not acceptable, then that country needs to be denied access.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Yet another idiotic ruling by another idiotic court.
I'm sure the judge will be well-loved by the masses when Austria can no longer reach any Google services.
You sat on him, Chris. His family would like the flattened remains.
Atari Teenage Riot is a German band.
While this might sound as a good thing to curb piracy and stop people from straight uploading copyrighted material, the consequences of a rulling like this have far reaching consequences that goes way beyond that.
It's a preliminary judgement that will most likely be appealed and end up reversed once judges understands the problems with this idea, which they most likely don't.
But if it doesn't get reversed, I fully predict YouTube and Google just ending service in Austria, because it's not feasible for the platform to work in any capacity with a ruling like that.
And it's fruitless, because unless the service is fully blocked by ISPs plus VPN services and other circunventing methods, people will keep using it. The loss is entirely on users and the country itself. Prossecuting cases coming from people living in other countries would need deals and hubris that would effectively make this an on paper decision that will never have any consequence.
There is no way for a social network platform to work at scale with potential liability for each and every single video uploaded to the platform. And this is something judges from all countries that work with these platforms should understand. It's a very simple concept that is very unfortunate to see judges in this day and age, no matter how old or disconnected from tech and Internet they are, not knowing about. It's a broad display of ignorance on how things in the Internet works that should put in question the ability of certain judges to accuratly access matters related to an entire class of cases.
YouTube already has the overzealous content ID system plus a whole ton of other custom algorithms and whatnot to detect copyright violations, and they have been tuned to a point where they constantly get false positives - a common complaint of content creators.
If that's not enough, and the platform becomes liable for a lawsuit everytime potential copyrighted content gets uploaded to the platform, it's just better to close doors. Because there isn't any viable way to comply with something like this other than algorithms, which are arguably incredibly advanced for what they do. It's like saying knife makers are now liable for every single murder commited with a knife.
People don't fully appreciate how hard it is to detect such a nebulous idea as "copyright infringement". Highly trained human specialists with extensive knowledge on the matter often cannot do this well enough, having to take it to courts and spend years to decide.
I'm no advocate for any of the crappier stuff social networks do, but what a judgement like this is asking for is fundamentally impossible. It's the same thing as telling these services they are forbidden from operating in the country, period.
Putting things in perspective, YouTube has over one billion users globally (can't account for Austrian users only because the service doesn't put up regional barriers unless explicitly asked to), statistics from 5 years ago points out that it has over 100 hours of video uploaded every minute (with more current non-official estimated projections putting that number up to the 500s), and the only way to be 100% sure that content being uploaded has no copyright infringements on it is by manually watching everything and doing some very extensive research which would most likely not cover every copyright infringement scenario possible.
With those types of numbers, it also isn't feasible in any way, shape or form to cover everything no matter how many people you have working 24/7 on reports, flagging, banning and whatnot because those also have to go through an evaluation process. And that's looking at it after the fact and relying on a flagging system. To completely avoid lawsuits YouTube would have to become a curation platform - videos published only after a process of analysis and approval.
Imagine submitting 500 hours of video uploaded every minute to an evaluation process for copyright infringement? Even with a large team of people working only on that, you'd
Whoosh!
Youtube is responsible for third party content hosting and Amazon is not responsible for third party selling.
I know, I know, many people don't like the nonsensical recommendation engines of various services. But they really hate those in Austria.
copyright theft
There is literally no such thing as "copyright theft," and it is a stupid idea to call copyright infringement that (not only because it is factually wrong, but it sounds absurd - you don't seize the copyright by infringing on it).
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
It is not neutral. It already censors and decides what is monetizable and what is not. They can't have it both ways. Either be truly neutral (like they used to be) or abide these kinds of rulings.
there's no justice, just big money getting its way over the little people again, they stole the public's domain and now they own us
In order to comply with this, if (theoretically) it was enforced world-wide upon YouTube, would be for YouTube to have every video uploaded sit in a private space that only YouTube has access to, and have a human employee of YouTube view the video looking for copyright violations. In essense it would be the death of YouTube.
But wait, there's more: That would set a legal precedent for any media hosting on the entire Internet; everyone, from the largest to the smallest company, would have to do the same vetting of uploaded media in order to protect themselves from liability. Something like Facebook, for instance, would have to have every static photograph uploaded scrutinized, too, to ensure that there's nothing in the background that's IP belonging to anyone who would sue over it.
Theoretically, a ruling like this, if it was upheld worldwide, would more or less destroy the Internet as we know it. The only entities it would serve would be large media companies; the Internet would become, even more so than it is already, just a tool for business and revenue generation, not much of anything in the interests of private individuals. Many companies providing hosting of uploaded media would simply cease to exist or stop offering the ability to upload anything for fear of being legally liable for copyright violation.
The Internet is becoming a slow-motion trainwreck. Between government censorship in so many countries, cybercrime, abuses by people and organizations pushing 'fake news', and ISPs wanting to go back to the 'walled garden' business model, the Internet is slowly but surely becoming unusable.
It's not just uploads. Search current live streams and you'll find tons of rebroadcasts of copyright content such as Fox news and live sporting events.
See my subject & letting you f yourself dumbass https://it.slashdot.org/commen... you inferior moron.
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APK
P.S.=> Your DIM brains are blatantly inferior evidenced by your FAKE NAMES online for FAKE lives of being "ne'er-do-well" scum having the AUDACITY to even TRY "F" w/ me & ones like you you INFERIOR swine as I cast PEARLS before SWINE like you... apk
Any Youtube executives in Austria could just "get to da choppa" and they they could ignore this ruling.
If this is what it takes to get rid of auto playing video, so be it.
Why not possit a multimedia copyright container to the media mafia instead and redirect ALL video to them to ‘vet’ and that service must be free and within an acceptable timeframe to then have the container signed and sent back to google if anyone is to be compliant to their demands moving forward.
What is this you say, ask the RIAA, MPAA, and whoever else to do something for free??? That's just crazy talk, you need to be medicated! Of course we're expected to pay, pay, pay for everything; what are you, some sort of communist or something? </extreme_sarcasm>