YouTube's fate rests on decade-old copyright law

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I respectfully disagree.

macbill inscribed:
The fair use doctrine allows legitimate use of limited portions for specific purposes - home entertainment is not one of those purposes.

Dang, man . . . way to quote the RIAA when they were going after the manufacturers of the cassette recorder! (an effort that failed miserably)

Fair-use doctrine also allows /private/ use of recordings in another media. You're not allowed to give it away. This being said, there is an issue here, but it is solvable by one means: Education of users. Watermarking (invisible, inaudible or not) is no guarantee. License-based WMV and WMA just infuriate legitimate users, should they ever lose those backed-up licenses (or get stung by licenses that are, in reality, malware!).

Education of users, in what should and should not be shared, is a first step. One that has never been actually pursued on a large scale.

I'm a computer consultant who's logged thousands of hours cleaning up after malware. Some of that malware (and this is according to members of the black-hat hacker community) was commissioned by the RIAA to discredit KaZaA and similar systems. I still remember seeing more than one message on KaZaA's chat system showing that a specific person had been paid tens of thousands of dollars by the RIAA to code malware to be distributed on KaZaA. This only worked because KaZaA, unlike modern P2P systems, didn't do MD5 hashing of the content.

Do I believe that all such claims were literal truth? No. However, this was during the period that the RIAA was pulling out all the stops in an effort to (by their own words) poison the P2P systems out of business.

I see both sides at fault here. Viacom for trying to pass responsibility onto YouTube for enforcement, and YouTube for having allowed uploaders to toss copyrighted material up without proper licensing.

I have said it before, and I will say it again: No matter who wins in court, everyone will lose.

Posted by: Raymond Danner   Posted on: 03/14/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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