One billion dollars. A lot of money. That’s what Viacom is suing Youtube for copyright infringement. It is widely know that copyrighted materials of famous TV shows or even music videos do appear readily on YouTube. The problem doesn’t lie only with YouTube but also with the plethora of other video sharing sites out there.

I stumbled upon a newspaper article entitled “The Case Against YouTube” in the Cincinnati Post written by Douglas Lichtman. As a law proffessor at the University of Chicago he has joined the team of lawyers that are going after YouTube in this lawsuit. In it he shares why.

It is clear from his column that he does like YouTube. Who wouldn’t? It provides an easy way to display user generated content. He agrees that YouTube and similar sites have done well in allowing people to share their works with the world and provide a technological means of doing so.

He states however that because some people will submit copyrighted videos a second audience emerges - one that visits to watch these types of videos. Lichtman suggests that since YouTube collects data on each video that is submited (title, description, tags), it could run that against known copyrighted materials and then if something matches put it on a list to be reviewed by a moderator.

Lastly, he points to the fact of bad intent. Even though copyright law is fishy when it comes to new technology it doesn’t meant that it can be exploited to the degree that YouTube is.

It will be very interesting to see how this legal battle will shape up to be. If they don’t settle out of court it could set a precedent that all other video sites would have to follow.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 22nd, 2007 at 6:17 pm and is filed under Google, Legal, Tech News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.