Till now, there have been some C&Ds sent to YouTube on its entertainment related clips uploaded by users. The video sharing site has taken measures against it.
Now, an LA-based video news service has sued YouTube for allowing its users to upload copyrighted video footage, including the beating of trucker Reginald Denny during the 1992 riots. “The scope of the infringements is akin to a murky moving target, in that videos uploaded are not identified by copyright owner or registration number but rather by the uploader’s idiosyncratic choice of descriptive terms to describe the content of the video — tags — making it extremely impractical to identify plaintiff’s copyrighted works,” Los Angeles News Service owner and operator Robert Tur alleges in the lawsuit.
Anyway, that’s a good segue into this another story by Fred von Lohmann about YouTube’s balancing act when it comes to managing copyrights. The good news for YouTube is that it stands on much firmer legal ground than the old Napster did, thanks to a special provision in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that protects Internet hosting services, says the story. The question is whether YouTube’s future business plans will jeopardize its copyright safe harbor.
All of this puts pressure on YouTube to come up with innovative business opportunities other than ads before, during and after the videos.