Should Youtube be exempt from copyright?

[WolfEdge]

Fuck the corporations, I would be fine with youtube being exempt.

Youtube IS a corporation.

Paradox??

 

[jpoon]

Fuck the corporations, I would be fine with youtube being exempt.

Youtube IS a corporation.

Paradox??

Haha, yes very much so!

PS - I'm no fan of Youtube either.

 

[EzraPound]

No, there is no reason for them to be exempt.

A company/individual has the right to control their own intellectual property. If they want to release them on Youtube, on the radio, or any other method they choose that THEIR choice, not YOUR choice.

Oh, and its not hard to take a copy of any song/video on youtube.

Kind of missed the point, here--that YouTube doesn't involve the possession of media, therefore the piracy argument is even more tenuous than it would be with downloads (which is enough of a minefield, anyway). Also, where does your logic end? If users sharing videos with each other on YouTube is "releasing", then is someone playing an album for someone else doing the same? Presumably you're predicating your argument on some standard of reproduction.

The problem I find with your argument about playing the album vs. posting a video on youtube is that by playing an album the music retains its rival nature, i.e. that it is data physically embodied in the form of a disk. If all music was stored this way only, it would be a rival good, as only people with access to the disk could use it, and as such its distribution could be more easily controlled.

If posted on a website such as youtube, however, the IP embodied in the work becomes non-rival. It is capable of infinite duplication to an unlimited number of people (provided they have access to a computer). The problem here is that it removes incentives for people to pay for such goods, as they can listen to the song as many times as they like on youtube or record the song whilst playing it on youtube using a recording program. This is what IP rights are designed to control. Whether or not you agree with that aim is up to you.

Also, ever heard of something called Fair Use? These details get trampled underfoot by the corporate brainwash campaign, which you've obviously bought into:

"Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use."

Personally, I don't think full allowance of YouTube publication would make much of a difference, commercially. I know the main thing I use it for is sending others a song or video whereas I couldn't with a hard copy--something buying a CD or DVD wouldn't change. If I like an artist's songs I hear on YouTube, I'll download their album, and then maybe pay to see them live. Actually, I just got back from seeing Lil' Wayne, Nicki Minaj, and Rick Ross in Buffalo yesterday--I wouldn't have got into the guy's music in all likelihood if it weren't for file-sharing, and now I've picked up a poster, a t-shirt, and $300 in concert tickets.

. . .Of course, that's not to suggest that file-sharing is making the industry more profitable. But who cares? Major record labels have never done scat for artists, a download is not akin to physical theft, and half of the great popular music songs were stolen from somebody else anyway, before you downloaded them on Pirate Bay.

I think if you look into the background of fair use clauses such as this you'll find that the use they're referring to is in reference to the artist's work in a work of your own, such as writing lyrics in a gig review, etc. I really don't think that applies in the case of downloading music for personal pleasure, as you are circumventing the exact contract relationship IP rights are designed to protect, which I hardly think can be called "fair use"...

And yeah, major record labels can be dicks to artists, but I've never viewed this as an acceptable excuse to download music illegally. Some money is better than no money, and if the artists were unhappy about the deal they're getting then they wouldn't be in it! I suppose it helps that very little music I listen to could ever be described as being on a "major" label, but still...

No, all that matters is ownership, whether its the rich, the poor, or corporations

Poverty has never been an excuse to steal, especially when its something like video and music, which, last time I checked, was not a necessity for life.

What do you mean poverty isn't an excuse to steal? Of course it is!

Let me hit you with a little bit of basic level political philosophy. There is a social contract. It requires that citizens adhere to the rules established by a government, provided the rules are fair. When the rules are fair, it is the moral prerogative of the government to punish citizens for disobeying them. When they are not fair, it is the moral prerogative of citizens to subvert them by the means available.

This is, in fact, what a revolution is--the appropriation of government property by masses who've (often) been grossly abused by a small elite. Even crime is mostly the product of disenfranchisement--there are always sickos out there, but crime rates globally basically correlate with levels of poverty and oppression.

If people are oppressed enough by legal means, it rationalizes the violation of their means of oppression--in this case, laws. I'm not saying that the demographic that uses the Escapist is "oppressed", by any means, but I just object to your juvenile, Randian use of the term "never."

Declaring there to be a social contract is pretty presumptuous, don't you think? Social contractarian theories are just one jurisprudential explanation of just society among many... However, being American I imagine you might have been taught that such theories are gospel (I'm not saying this to be rude, but common national ideals in the USA conform tightly to Lockean and Nozickian paradigms).

Also, you seem to be skewing the context of what we're talking about here. In the case of IP rights, the kind of uprising you depict would surely be in rallying against patents for things such as pharmaceuticals etc. not copyrights in artistic works?

I would also be interested to know how the use of the term "never" can be "Randian". I assume you are referring to Randian objectivism, but how or why I have no idea...

1) I understand your point here, but your comments about "rival nature"--you should admit--are debatable, since YouTube does not provide a manipulable hard copy. In areas of such subjectivity--keep in mind libraries run contrary to the interests of booksellers in much the same way, but are so trenchant no one will argue against them--I generally think that a liberal copyright policy is good, since it helps ensure broad public access to media; a goal I think is generally more important than the record biz's profit maximization.

Actually, a judge in Canada ruled a few years back that he saw no difference, even, between downloading a song from Limewire for personal use and photocopying a document from a library--which should shed some light on how multifarious the arguments for and against are.

2) The application of Fair Use clauses vacillate greatly overtime. Several decades ago, for example, it was fairly unprecedented that offhand, photocopied documents used in classes had to be subjected to copyright provisions, but now said practice is increasingly common. I think it's in the interests of the public sphere to safeguard the rights of consumers, and citizens.

Also, your argument about choice makes more sense in a post-Internet environment, but keep in mind for a long time the record industry was an oligopoly with no foreseeable escape route--in fact, arguably the kind of corporate cartel anti-trust laws are meant to protect against (because they eliminate the choice you describe--people's independent bargaining power). In this sense, protestation makes more sense, since it's not as if there were an abundance of choices available if you wished to sell your music other than to submit to barefaced exploitation.

3) I'm a Canadian, and actually not a big fan of liberal philosophy--I'll take Burke, or Foucault instead--so while I was aware that the view I was presenting was myopic, I didn't expect to get taken up on it seriously, either. Nonetheless, I think social contract theory does an adequate job explaining the flexibility of moral correctness as it applies to disputes between the government and citizens--that the matter of whose in the right is conditional, which means that social manifestations such as stealing are not always wrong.

And yeah, patents and whatnot for pharmaceuticals are issues of greater import, but that doesn't mean copyright laws are a write-off that doesn't factor in the essential public interest--to the extent that they're skewed against the populace at large, or artists themselves, they can be mechanisms of actualized oppression. Whatever else, anyway, the proliferation of file-sharing has been beneficial for most artists: rather than having to work within a tightly-controlled oligopoly, in which publicity is meted out to a small handful of artists apt to maximize industry profits, now people's musical tastes have diversified owing to the sheer variety of mediums they can receive music from. The result of this generally is that--while we may not see another Thriller--your garden-variety talented musician (not a contradiction in terms, necessarily) can attract some interest via YouTube or Pitchfork, and maybe hope to charge a bit more for tix as a consequence or sell a few t-shirts and gewgaws.

Oh, yeah, and they've obviously abetted the musical literacy of the public, too. So who's complaining?

 

[cerealnmuffin]

I actually found a few artists thanks to getting to listen to them on youtube. I would look up people's recommends on amazon and pull them up on youtube, listen to them, and then buy the cd or at least the mp3 if it was something I really liked.

I don't think whole movies should be put up, but you have to watch it in parts which can be annoying and if it was really good someone would pick it up.

I think the main issue is that many times people do the fairuse when making let's plays, rant reviews, and funny videos, but they still get their videos or accounts banned due to copyright. The video creators are within copyright law to make such videos, but the youtube admins would rather take down a video without really investigating that. A few really great and funny let's players lost their accounts due to that. Also the net comedian Cinema Snob had it happen to him a couple times.

 

[Plurralbles]

youtube is getting money from someone elses work. Fuck that.

What... someting... once big and successful enough adn part of YOUR every day life... is exempt from internationl law? Not cool, bro.

 

[crudus]

Companies have their own youtube accounts where they get money for you listening to their music even if you have no intention of ever buying the music in the first place. I can kind of see why some record companies do it the way they do it now. Their music still gets out and they still get money.

 

[bpm195]

Here are a couple videos from a lawyer that works for the ALCU explaining both how things are supposed to work in regards to copyright infringment.

The moral of the story is that if a copyright holder decides to send a cease and desist order for a video posted by a third party user, that user may either allow YouTube to remove the videos or challenge the copyright holders.

On the recurring theme of posting somebody's copyrighted material on youtube, in addition to providing a source of material for people who want to view the material without paying, they're additionally depriving the copyright holder of web traffic and hence potential web revenue. For example, some random indie band that's trying to turn a profit will likely have their own website, a myspace page, a youtube page, and a facebook page.

From the myspace page and their website they're able to make sales, whereas from youtube for facebook they can only hope to get people to visit their website or myspace. Facebook has the additional advantage of contagious exposure (1 person likes something and all their friends know). Youtube isn't nearly as beneficial, and if they want their music there they can post it theirselves. You're not doing them a favor by posting it for them.

 

[EzraPound]

No, there is no reason for them to be exempt.

A company/individual has the right to control their own intellectual property. If they want to release them on Youtube, on the radio, or any other method they choose that THEIR choice, not YOUR choice.

Oh, and its not hard to take a copy of any song/video on youtube.

Kind of missed the point, here--that YouTube doesn't involve the possession of media, therefore the piracy argument is even more tenuous than it would be with downloads (which is enough of a minefield, anyway). Also, where does your logic end? If users sharing videos with each other on YouTube is "releasing", then is someone playing an album for someone else doing the same? Presumably you're predicating your argument on some standard of reproduction.

You don't have to copy it to breach copyright. For example, on most music/DVDs, showing them in public is a copyright violation unless you have a seperate license to do that. That is in effect what you are doing on youtube.

Also, ever heard of something called Fair Use? These details get trampled underfoot by the corporate brainwash campaign, which you've obviously bought into:

"Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use."

Well first off thats only the legislation in one country, which by the way is one of the complicaitons in dealing with broadcasting on youtube. My understanding of the case law around this in both Canada and the US is that "fair use" does not include public display of the entire document. Heck, even full copying for educational purposes is not permitted. That provision was meant for you to take snipits (which youtube does allow).

Personally, I don't think full allowance of YouTube publication would make much of a difference

Well actually since illegal file sharing came it it has proven to make a difference. Sales are a tiny fraction of what they were in the 80s or 90s.

Besides, its not your property, you don't get to decide.

1) Fair use is determined on a case-by-case basis. If I showed a movie I purchased to a few of my friends, for example (i.e., "in public"), it would fall under fair use. In terms of showing one to a larger audiences, the entirety of the situation would be considered, with importance being allotted to factors such as whether I'm profiting from it, the size of the audience, the context of the showing ("entertainment" is viewed differently from "education"), etc. In one instance, in Canada, a cottage resort was taken to court for showing full films for free to its occupants--but the case was dismissed as superfluous.

Obviously, the fact YouTube 1) does not provide hard copies, 2) does not involve financial transactions between individual users, and 3) is a user-based, "sharing" system all complicate the production of any kind of verdict on whether it falls under fair use. As a result of this, the legal status of copyrighted material on YouTube varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

2) There's some truth to your comment about reproducing complete works in public; however, whether you'd even define much of what's on YouTube as a "complete work" is debatable. As I mentioned before, in Canada, for example, one result of the CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada verdict (which allowed for the unrestricted photocopying of content from books for personal) was that a judge subsequently declared the downloading of music legal, as he saw downloading an .mp3 as no different than obtaining the section of a book from a library photocopier (this distinction relies on the notion of an "album" as a complete work).

Uploading was another matter--it's flimsy territory, though largely illegal in Canada--but the RCMP has made explicit statements that they're not intending to pursue non-profit uploaders, and private lawsuits attempted by the CRIA floundered on the grounds that they weren't considered strong enough to warrant the violating of defendants' privacy. So in Canada, anyway--when it comes to non-profit sharing--all instances of it are either legal, or simply cannot be taken action against.

3) But YouTube isn't "file-sharing" in the explicit sense, because you do not actually receive a hard copy of a file. My point wasn't that file-sharing hasn't damaged the profitability of the "record biz"--obviously it has, to the benefit of unaffiliated artists who now have greater exposure everywhere--but that YouTube in particular does not fully supplant the utility of, say, a purchased CD or DVD.

And actually, given that I was part of a voter bloc that installed governments in Canada that have chosen to either legalize or not enforce against file-sharing, I do get to decide!

 

[Altorin]

exempt? No, not exempt. Youtube, the uploaders and the copyright holders themselves need to seriously understand fair usage laws.

 

[8bitlove2a03]

Legally? No, they should not be exempt.

In practice, yes. Honestly, you're 100% right about Youtube's ability to give bands free promotion. You want to know how many albums I've bought because I heard their songs on Youtube first?

1. Band of Skulls - Baby Darling Dollface Honey
2. Coldplay - Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends
3. Dave Matthews Band - Big Whiskey and the Groo-Grux King
4. Jet - Shakka Rock
5. Modest Mouse - Good News for People Who Love Bad News
6. Muse - Black Holes and Revelations
7. Ok Go - Of the Blue Colour of the Sky
8. The Raconteurs - Consolers of the Lonely
9. The Strokes - Is This It?
10. The Sword - Age of Winters
11. Train - Drops of Jupiter
12. White Stripes - Elephant

I couldn't have even known about some of those bands if it wasn't for Youtube. I know anecdotes are crappy evidence to use in an argument, but I've still spent $120 or so on music because of Youtube. So yeah, I'd say the record companies could stand to let people go about their business.