For as
long as I’ve been following technology in any sort of meaningful way I’ve been
hearing about the problems of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is. Under
the DMCA, companies are able to send “take down requests” to those companies who
are violating their copyrights. Seems reasonable enough, but it lacks due
process, which is an obvious problem. Companies like YouTube have to setup
infrastructure that allows them to process these requests. Because o f the
nature and scope of the problem, it is cost prohibitive to involve humans at
every step of this process, which is unfortunate because copyright is too
complex for programs to handle everything correctly. Fair use specifically
makes this almost impossible. A human is required to judge what is and what is
not an example of fair use.
Just to
demonstrate this let’s look at an example of fair use. One place where fair use
applies is in news and criticism. Imagine you’ve just bought a game recently
and it was so bad that you just had to tell someone, so you make a review of it
that tears it apart. Fair use should protect you from any sort of copyright
issues with this video in theory. It makes sense that it would work that way,
using copyright law to silence criticism would be awful.
You
know what really sucks? That kind of thing actually happens on YouTube.
Companies abuse copyright law to try to silence critics. I really don’t know why, it’s about a good
idea as trying to put out grease fire with water, you just make it worse. If
the person who has their video taken down knows what they’re doing, they’ll
manage to make a big deal out of the situation. They may even be able to get
Twitter to form an angry mob (who can blame them, it’s not very hard and I bet it’s
a TON of fun).
Unfortunately
angry twitter users don’t mean anything when lawyers get involved. Actually,
maybe it’s fortunate. Regardless, when the
copyright holders try to take legal action outside of the DMCA’s takedown
system, many of the time content creators are not equipped to deal with this. If
the content creator can’t fight back, then the censors win.
After
years of problems with intellectual property on YouTube, Google finally did
something that might start to fix the
problem. In a post on the Google Public Policy blog, they announced that they
would be offering legal protection to select number of videos. If the creator
gets sued for their fair use video on YouTube, Google will pay for the court
costs to defend themselves in any legal battle that may arise. There is another
caveat with this; the video will only remain available in the United States.
This is to ensure that any case would occur under U.S. jurisdiction. Depending
on the video, this may basically render the service useless, but it’s better
than nothing.
Personally,
I love the theory behind this. Google has been putting millions of dollars into
YouTube to encourage better content. The specter of Google’s legal team with
millions of dollars to spend should also help encourage content creation. Without
even going to court, this should be able to make a difference. I anxiously await
any data on what this new policy actually does.
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