Demaestro - 3:30 pm on Jun 24, 2010 (gmt 0)

Here you have a company (Viacom) sending employees out into the world to upload videos in an attempt to trick Youtube into hosting content that Viacom holds the copyright to. Which has the side effect of making the videos not in violation of copyright protection since the copyright holder was directing (aka allowing) the content to be posted there.

In this case we have a percentage of Viacom videos being legal copies on Youtube and a percentage of Viacom videos that infringe on Viacom's copyright on Youtbe. The legal copies were put there using tricky methods, like anon accounts, using known public IPs ranges (kinkos).

How is it reasonable to ask Youtube to sort that all out when ONLY Viacom can know which videos they uploaded? How can Youtube know which were put by authorized employees and which weren't?

Only Viacom can know which videos they gave permission to their employees to upload and only Viacom truly knows all the accounts that this was done from. So how can anyone expect Youtube to sort this out for Viacom?

I am sorry but I am done being nice.

I will just say it.

You are STUPID and even NAIVE if you honestly believe that it is possible for Youtube to screen each video with even 90% accuracy determine if a video uploaded by user a violates any other copyright in the known world. It isn't possible, and if anyone here can figure out how to do it you have a million/billion dollar idea that sites like Hulu would love to buy from you. The fact is that they are trying to come up with a system and are spending millions and still haven't succeeded, and yet there are no less then 10 people on this site who claim it would be a simple task. If it is simple then develop it and you will make more money then Youtube could ever hope to.

Until then the DMCA is a sane and proper way of dealing with this issue and Youtube is protected and rightfully so.

This had nothing to do with tricky lawyer arguments or double legal talk, the judge ruled that Youtube is protected by the safe harbor act.

As it should be. As is WebmasterWorld. If it had gone the other way............ a WebmasterWorld user with no morals about making illegal copies for themselves decides to upload a page from a book to WebmasterWorld and Brett nor any of the mods recognize it as being from a published book. Then the book publisher sees it. They could sue and have this site shut down for hosting content that violates someone's copyright. How can any webmaster think that would have been a good ruling? Honestly?