Posted by J. Clarke on 12/05/06 14:00

On Tue, 05 Dec 2006 22:04:38 +1300, Colin B wrote:

> "PTravel" <ptravel@travelersvideo.com> wrote in message
> news:_EXch.10189$yf7.3856@newssvr21.news.prodigy.net...
>>
>> "Colin B" <Colin B@cb.org> wrote in message
>> news:4573e69e$1@clear.net.nz...
>>> Now that it's easy to put your digital photographs and movies on to a
>>> video sharing site, such as "youtube", the question of whether copyright
>>> infringements really harm the copyright holders is now a hot topic. See,
>>> for example, the article titled:
>>>
>>> Youtube copyright infringements are not all bad for the copyright
>>> holders?
>>>
>>> http://fredhere.blogspot.com/
>>>
>>> What do you think of the arguments in this blog? Should copyright holders
>>> take a broad view and tolerate copyright infringements on youtube as is
>>> suggested in this blog?
>>>
>>> See also the youtube site: http://www.youtube.com/
>>
>> Copyright is an exclusive right, meaning the reserved rights are owned,
>> entirely, by the copyright owner. It doesn't matter whether infringements
>> are "not all bad" or not -- copyright is, by definition, a right to
>> exclude. Your argument is pointless as it would mean, among other things,
>> amending the Constitution and ignoring several hundred years of
>> intellectual property jurisprudence.
>
> Nevertheless, in practice, it seems that copyright holders are taking a
> broad view because there are a HUGE number of what must surely be illegal
> copies of video clips from DVDs, TV shows etc. on youtube. Youtube seems to
> place the responsibility on the people uploading the videos to truthfully
> declare that permission has been obtained from the legal copyright holders.
> Although the copyright holders must know that their legal rights are
> constantly being infringed on this site, a lot of them seem to choose to do
> nothing about it. This may indicate that they are not really concerned about
> low quality video extracts from their work appearing on youtube because of
> the advertising value of these clips to the millions of people who visit
> this site. Why else could such huge numbers of "illegal" video clips not be
> deleted from youtube? Unless of course, people genuinely have received
> permission from the copyright holders to upload limited extracts from their
> work on to youtube.

Perhaps because the copyright holders can't afford to hire a monitoring
team large enough to track the whole of youtube?

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