If a user uploads a piece of content to a video sharing site and that content is deemed to be an infringement of copyright then who is to blame?
If you are Viacom and the site is YouTube (before it implemented more control) then YouTube is to blame. If you are Universal Music and the site is Veoh then apparently Veoh is not to blame. A nice article from Adage describes the relative merits of the court judgements here.
It is a challenge to see how technology can be allowed to do it’s thing without upsetting the people who own the right to make money from the content that is being shared. After all if I make a video in a public space and there happens to be some music playing in the background for which I don’t have the online rights then who would be in the legal firing line if I uploaded it? The site should have checked to make sure that I had the rights and that they weren’t in contravention of any pre-existing agreements, I should have checked as the video creator/uploader that I had the rights or the content owning company can just let it go and hope that I don’t represent their music in a bad light.
The fact is that the ‘ostrich syndrome’ hasn’t worked out well for music, newspapers or TV. Unless these content owners figure out a way to let people interact with their content in a way which makes it easy for people to use it on purpose or accidentally then how will we ever know which side of the law we fall on. I am not an apologist for piracy, I gladly pay money for content but it has to be easily discoverable, easy for me to pay for it and in a format that makes sense. These aren’t new arguments but still the content owners aren’t meeting the needs of their customers – the public.
