YouTube Sued for Copyright Infringement

[Ioman]

Not to sound like a jerk because I know everyone loves YouTube, but it was bound to happen. The truth is that they make like 80% of theor profit from copyrighted video. I don't care if their users submit it, it's still illegal and should be screened IMO.

Here is why the EFF thinks its perfectly ok though:

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004815.php

What do you guys think?

[neuroking]

I know YouTube is somewhat illegal, but really... the quality is ****. You could put every movie ever made up there and I wouldn't cancel my Netflix subscription. Why not come to some marketing agreement whereby some of the ad revenue goes to the copyright holders? Maybe make it based on how much content is posted.

I think teh EFF has a good point. Say you are CBS and you want to compete with YouTube. Easiest way? Register 100 accounts and post CBS material from some ananymous network, like I2P or Tor. Send the lawyers after YouTube, and voila!

[dang]

To be honest, I dont go to youtube looking for full episodic content. In fact, I didnt even know there is full episodic content up on there (is there really?!) I look for stuff that makes me laugh.

I think they are clearly taking advantage of the DMCA, but the site would not have exploded in popularity if every piece of content had to be moderated. Imagine the # of moderators you'd need as well. It just wouldnt work.

You could say the same thing about digg. It would not be as popular if each submission had to be moderated before being viewable. Digg would not be successful.

Digg could technically also be sued for copyright infringement. Any site that has comments too.

At some point you have to rely on users to be responsible and help with moderation if you plan on having a site that relies on user submitted content as it's business model, and you want it to be popular.

If YouTube didnt do user moderation, how could they allow for massive amounts of user submitted content? What are some ways for them to do it right?

[Ioman]

Comparing TouTube to Digg is a bad comparison. Digg is posting links to the stories. YouTube is posting the actual content even if its just a part.

[ebaydoug]

Yahoo and Google should be sued as well.

[Ioman]

I didn't think that Google or Yahoo are showing copyprotected content?