Copyright Talk

Viacom and Google are locked in legal battle over who has the legal responsibility to prevent copyright violations on YouTube. There’s a great, concise little explanation of this and links to the companies own explanations of what they are fighting about by Mike Rowland on the Future of Communities. Read it here.

One comment by Rowland caught my attention. He says “Your local cable access station cannot let you sign up for free air time and then show an episode of the Colbert Report you recorded at home, why should the internet be any different? ”

And all of a sudden it hit me why we’re having a problem. Rowland is right that the cable company clearly has the legal obligation to prevent the airing of copyrighted material without permission, and the reason it’s that way, rather than waiting for the owner to complain, is that the cable company has a limited amount of airtime, along with people who actually see and feel each segment aired, and as such they are in a much better position to police what happens on their airwaves than are the owners of content. Content owners would have to watch 24/7 on hundreds of cable companies in order to find a possible violation that may or may not even be occurring. It doesn’t make sense.

However, the same model doesn’t make sense on a technology like YouTube, because it is designed to be run without the hands and eyes on support of actual people. Computers, the internet, digital technology - these all make possible a sort of self-running community that the owners do not have to support with large numbers of personnel. This makes possible the free access for hundreds of thousands of people.

But the model still doesn’t make sense for the content owners, either. It’s not realistic for them to view everything that goes up on the web on the chance some of it is their stuff.

The scale has changed so dramatically, and the automation has become so complete, that we no longer have any existing model that makes sense. Maybe the video recognition software being tested by Google is in fact the model of the future.

Do we want free and easy access to lots and lots of stuff, or do we want human people involved in our lives? That may be the policy decision we are facing.