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Posted by Bill on 02/06/07 14:37
The world has changed. Get over it. I think people still immersed in
the old business models see their infrastructure crumbling but can't see
how the new possibilities might be even better-- as Apple clearly did
with the iPod.
I hope Viacom has their wish: Youtube will delete all their videos--
that's their policy if they receive a complaint. Then Viacom will pay
millions of dollars to show clips in ads on regular TV. Duh!
The "principle" of copyright is indeed in trouble. The trouble is that
people don't really understand the original purpose of copyright. The
trouble is also that people have this illusion that Walt Disney's "The
Little Mermaid", for example, is "original" (Disney stole it, along with
"The Lion King" and most of everything else they produce). Most
rock'n'roll is derived from long established models of chord
progressions and riffs. Art steals from landscapes or objects (Warhol's
Campbell Soup cans). Ever see a TV episode in which one major character
seems to have forgotten another major character's birthday? Lucy? Mr.
Ed? Gilligan? Edith? Maude? Homer?
The sad truth is that most of the current big corporations fighting for
stricter copyright enforcement could not themselves have been profitable
without outright theft. (Exactly how many "reality" tv shows are there,
by the way? Hey, I got an idea: we get a bunch of people on a show,
have them do something, then kick one of them off every episode!...)
We have simply entered an era in which definitions of "original" and
"copy" and "collage" and "edited" and "found" are rapidly changing.
We'll survive. We've never had as much money to spend on diversions as
we do now, and the money is madly flowing in all directions. The
groaning and creaking we are hearing is the sound of decrepid old
business models struggling to re-orient themselves to the new realities.
The nimbler minds at Google, and Apple, and Youtube, and Myspace, etc.
have already found their way. The older models are not only inefficient
-- they're boring.
It would be very, very bad policy for the government to try to
artifically prop up those old monsters, the way some governments and
unions used to try to require stokers on diesel trains. The DMCA was a
clumsy attempt to do just that and I hope it dies slowly, the death of a
thousand Youtubes.
> think that copyright policing doesn't exist. Sites such as Youtube can set a
> bad example to our youth because even when copyrighted material is removed,
> someone fearlessly (and anonymously) is able to put it back up again. The
> whole principle of copyright seems to be under considerable threat in such
> video sharing web sites because copyrighted material that is uploaded is
> often slow to be removed, or not removed at all. You could almost say that,
> on a site like Youtube, copyright has been soundly defeated. The young
> people are obviously delighted with this, but the copyright holders aren't!
> See this article, "Does YouTube Have a Control Problem"?
>
> http://news.com.com/Does+YouTube+have+a+control+problem/2100-1030_3-6156025.html
>
> It says in this article that:
>
> "The parent company of Comedy Central and Nickelodeon demanded Friday that
> YouTube remove 100,000 clips from the site that feature Viacom shows. The
> number of videos is three times more than the 30,000 videos that the
> Japanese entertainment industry demanded YouTube pull last October. "
>
> This shows the huge extent of the copyright problem for YouTube.
>
>
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