When talking about Google’s takeover of Youtube (website, news), some people may think it is a nifty business move. For the company's legal team, however, it may soon turn into a long and nasty nightmare.
I found an interesting vote on MSNBC website.
Is acquiring YouTube a good move for Google? (there are total 3023 responses.)
Yes, this makes them even more dominant: 55%
Showing videos on the internet is nothing new. Their clever idea was to create a model that makes it easy not just to watch the films, but also to share them.
Want to show a film on YouTube? You don't have to mess about with video standards. Just upload your film and the website does all the heavy lifting. Just make sure you have labelled the clip correctly, so that the rest of the world can find it.
Watching is just as easy.
No worries about having the right video player. Plus you can rate films, recommend them to friends, comment on them - and even integrate them into your own website, without any technical knowledge.
Little wonder that YouTube has been a huge success.
In August 2005 the site had a measly 2.8 million users a month. One year later YouTube’s audience had grown to 72 million people.
This has created its own dynamic. People will post their films on YouTube because that's where the audience is, and the audience will grow ever larger because of the extra content.
It's social networking in overdrive.
Until now most copyright holders had little incentive to sue YouTube. The company was young and rapidly burning through its venture capital. However, now that YouTube is part of the Google, with a market capitalization of $129 billion, there is a serious incentive to let the lawyers off the leash.
Google and Youtube obviously don't see ourselves as content pirates.
I argue that they act fully within the law, based on general "fair use" standards, and more importantly the safe harbor provisions in section 512 of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998.
The act was designed to ensure copyright protection works in the digital age - although its authors clearly did not anticipate today's dynamic and on-demand digital world.
Section 512 helps "service providers" to avoid liability for acts of copyright infringement committed by third parties; it gives them a safe harbor.
It's a complicated piece of legislation, but here is one example of how it is supposed to work:
A service provider (YouTube) stores material (a pirated movie clip) on its system at the direction of a user (YouTube member). Meeting these conditions may help it qualify for the safe harbour provision - at least as long as YouTube makes it easy for copyright holders (a film studio) to complain about the infringement, and quickly removes pirated material that has been brought to its attention.
So far the