I feel like we’ve all given YouTube permission to sidestep the law and do whatever the heck they want. We’ve empowered them at the loss of our own state-secured rights.
The only thing this lawsuit will do is instigate a careful review of every DMCA complaint he ever filed to make sure they were handled correctly. Those are the only "state-secured rights" he actually has. The whole point of the DMCA is the safe-harbor clause that indemnifies Google/Youtube from the claimed liabilities as long as they followed the DMCA process correctly.
From a legal perspective, it doesn't matter one whit that the DMCA process is so broken that it's basically useless.
> “Once a pirated movie was found, Mr. Vasallo and Plaintiff would send YouTube a takedown notice. YouTube would then remove the pirated video movie in its entirety. However, YouTube would not remove all matching videos, as YouTube would specifically only remove the one video from the one infringer related to the single infringing upload identified in the takedown notice.
> “The same infringer would be free to upload the video again until three takedown notices were filed against him within a ninety-day period. Then and only then, would YouTube cancel the infringer’s username. The same infringer could then create a new username and begin the process of posting the pirated videos all over again,” the complaint notes.
> Over the past several years, the law firm sent over 10,000 takedown notices for pirated films that were viewed more than 500 million times on YouTube. The video service maintains that this is how the DMCA works, but the movie tycoon argued that the company should do more.
This (that is, uselessly) is also how YouTube used to handle domestic copyright claims. It is the process the law specifies. But they moved to their ContentID system despite not having to. Why?
Whatever reasons applied there may also apply here.
As much as we malign content it is still more workable than having YouTube manually purging all videos that appears to be infringing based on very little information. And most content creators who sample copyrighted media under fair use have learned to cope. The more egregious issues are more concentrated around misattributed licenses and musical performance.
This is not an assumption I would make. MegaUpload was a file transfer site. Videos on YouTube do not tend to be duplicates of other videos on YouTube.
Well, no, because the platform doesn't know which of those links were published with permission of the copyright holder and which weren't.
Responsibility flows from their self-imposed exclusivity.
I could frankly see some firms that imagine if they got the right tools, they could legal-DoS YouTube to death, and obviously all the former viewers would come running to their $15-per-month walled-gardens.
This is the opposite what US gov is calling for - to provide more transparency in the existing takedown practices.
It seems that content platforms are cought between a rock and hard place here. And the innovation needed is not a technical one - we have implemented the current laws to their full extent and they don't seem to fix the problem. We need to move the law forward now.
That’s because they chose to use technology to push growth above all other concerns. They’ve reached such a scale that it’s not feasible for humans to moderate the content users are posting. This is a problem of each platform’s own making.
We need to move the law forward now.
That’s one position. Another one is to argue that not every business model has a right to exist. These days I tend to find myself leaning towards the latter. I think we walk a dangerous road when we give too much power (and too little responsibility) to big tech companies like Google.
That what "move the law forward" means.