Since its creation, YouTube has faced lots of copyright persecution. YouTube, a video-sharing site, allows registered users to upload videos and unregistered users to view them. Although the site contains defamation, pornography, and copyright restrictions, the site is unable to control everything that is uploaded to it. As a result, YouTube has been sued, as well as, criticized for its failure to check that its videos respect the laws of copyright.
When a registered user uploads a video, a message saying: “Do not upload any TV shows, music videos, music concerts, or commercials without permission unless they consist entirely of content you created yourself” appears on the computer screen. Although, this warning is shown prior to uploading, many unauthorized clips are uploaded each day. Because YouTube does not view the videos before they are posted to the site, they are often blamed for copyright infringement. Thanks to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, however, YouTube is able to leave the search to copyright holders who can issue a takedown notice to the site if there is a problem.
In the past, Viacom, Mediaset, and the English Premier League have all filed suits against YouTube. In these suits, each company argued that YouTube does not do enough to protect copyrighted material.
In 2007, Viacom sued YouTube for one billion dollars worth of damages, stating that over 150,000 unauthorized clips of its material were found on the site and had been viewed about 1.5 billion times. When the lawsuit was settled in July 2008, Viacom was given access to the records of what people watched on YouTube. As a result, many bloggers and consumers complained about Viacom’s potential privacy violations. They argued that if Viacom were to use the information collected from Google’s YouTube to track down and sue those who watched unauthorized copyrighted clips on the site, they would be in violation of the right to privacy. Since the lawsuit with Viacom, YouTube has created VideoID, a program that checks uploaded videos against a database of copyrighted content in order to reduce violations.
Over the last few years, there has been a lot of speculation whether taking down an unauthorized video on YouTube is enough. Many copyright holders feel that YouTube should be doing more than VideoID to ensure that a video is not in violation of copyright law. Many consumers, on the other hand, sympathize with YouTube rather than the copyright holders. They feel that it would be difficult to control the millions of YouTube videos uploaded each day and to ensure that each follows the guidelines of copyright.
In the end it is all a matter of who is responsible. Should YouTube be responsible for the millions of videos posted each day on its site or should it be copyright holders’ responsibility to search the site for violations? What do you think?
Good detailed review of the Viacom case. You also provide a good description of the steps that YouTube takes to clearly position the responsibility with users. Nice work, Charlotte.
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