A fascinating piece on copyright issues in The Hollywood Reporter (via TV Squad) following on from Newsnight the other day.
There are a couple of questions I’ve got after reading this piece:
First, YouTube’s 10-minute clip limit and tiny video window cater to clip culture, not pirates.
Well yes, but it may be a tiny video window today, because YouTube is already facing massive bandwidth costs, but in a couple of years it could be serving full resolution HDTV for all I know. Yes, if I was a studio, I’d be targeting Bit Torrent and other P2P users rather than YouTube, but the question’s still there.
There’s also much made of the “Safe Harbor” rule in the US DCMA. Well that’s fine as far as it goes, which is to the shores of the US. What are the international implications? I’m reasonably sure that if I host copyright material on this UK hosted website, my hosts stand to be prosecuted as well – at least if they do nothing about it when alerted. I don’t know the ins and outs of the legalities, but in practical terms, threatening an ISP can be a guaranteed way to have your site removed irrespective of whether or not there’s a legal grounding for the claim.
It’s interesting to speculate on the longterm business model of YouTube, but they’re going to have to be careful. All those kids miming to their favourite songs are copyright, and it’d be pretty foolish for the record companies to sue their customers for being such big fans that they’re lip perfect when they sing along, but when have record companies ever done the smart thing? Look forward to a case soon.
I don’t see how there’s not a series of big legal cases coming soon for these sites. Even if what they’re doing is legal in the US, it may not be elsewhere. Don’t forget that for years, AllofMP3‘s defence has been that they’re legal in Russia where they’re hosted.