12-09-2018, 02:55 AM
Greg Wrote:Internet companies such as YouTube have made billions by building a content platform that users have loaded with stolen content and copyright violations. They managed to achieve this by relying on a U.S. law that places the burden of defending copyright and requesting the removal of illegal content solely on individual copyright owners, who can't possibly police the endless stream of content being uploaded every minute.
This law is what has allowed many Internet companies to operate with impunity for many years. But now that the EU is proposing a law that shifts the burden to where it belongs, on the companies hosting the content, serving it up, and profiting from it, YouTube wants to cry foul and scare content creators into being its unpaid political lobbyists.
I am unsympathetic and unimpressed. These companies have been glorified crime syndicates for over 20 years, and while we have all benefitted from their impunity, it is unfair to copyright owners and costs them a fortune.
YouTube's scare tactics are a clever attempt to claim that all "small" Internet companies will be unable to operate, and it will no longer be able to support individual content creators. But these are outright lies. Small businesses are exempt from the proposed law, YouTube already has filtering technology it will be able to use to help ensure compliance, and YouTube's businesss model is so dependent on content creators to generate revenue that the company will have to absorb the burden and costs.
It won't be easy, but it has the resources and means to do this, and while it will pass some of the costs on to users, the company has operated all along with the full understanding that laws in certain jurisdictions could change and dramatically affect its operations and business model. In business, this is what we call risks and threats. Your job is to manage, mitigate and prepare for them. But when you build your platform with such reliance on a single law and a sweeping disregard for copyright, you've assumed an extremely high-risk position. Tough luck.
I like your posts, Greg. Just to clarify, I am obviously not concerned about the welfare of Youtube/Google/Alphabet. - However, if taking down content for perceived copyright infringement is bound to become exponentially easier, the possibility of seeing sophisticated fan work will diminish. Talking in less abstract terms, for us here, this means that the chances that any of us are going stick our necks out and do a podcast, a video series, or anything of the kind, are likely dropping from "not very probable" to "about zero". That's not a statement on Google, on the (proposed?) new law, or any of the kind - that's just me saying, I don't want to burden what should be a recreational activity with any of the problems I have just described. Precisely because it's not *my* duty, let alone my job, to consider those things; it's Youtube's.