Posted by Bill on 12/06/06 14:09

A few years ago, a South American country privatized it's water supply
system. The new owners raised the price of water dramatically and
actually claimed that it was now illegal for citizens to collect rain
water for any purpose, since they had "exclusive" rights to supply water
to the city.

There was a massive uprising of citizens and the plan was shelved.

So, could be that many of these uploaders know perfectly well that there
are copyright issues, and they just don't care, or they think the law is
ridiculously constrictive.

Colin B wrote:

> What we are seeing from the contributors to this thread is that, many people
> are not well informed on copyright issues and are therefore likely to upload
> material to the youtube site that does not have the required copyright
> clearance. So doesn't this show that the onus should be on the WEBSITE OWNER
> to have all the material uploaded to the site first cleared for copyright
> issues BEFORE it is published? If visitors to the youtube site see literally
> thousands of items taken from DVDs and TV shows, then they obviously think
> it's OK to upload similar material, because the existing material must
> surely have the blessing of youtube's owners, otherwise it would have been
> taken down long ago.
>
> There is ample evidence to youtube's owners that it is simply not safe to
> rely on the judgment of the uploaders over copyright issues because they are
> simply not well enough informed. Even experts disagree a lot over copyright
> issues, so how can an uploader to youtube be expected to do the right thing?
> So perhaps the only answer for everybody is to wait for the copyright
> holders to complain, and then, and only then, take the offending material
> down?
>
> But could a person who illegally uploaded to youtube a few tracks from a DVD
> be sued? Wouldn't their defence be that youtube should have taken the clips
> down if they thought they infringed copyright?
>
>

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