Comments on: For YouTube videos, a 'fair use' boost

A federal judge's decision requires media companies to take a good look at videos before alleging they have infringed on their copyright. Will this make it tougher to send the dreaded take-down notices?

[Michichael]

Now we just need to establish some repercussions of making mistakes and we'll get somewhere. On the little guy a repercussion of a mistake can be a relatively large amount of money.

[MadLyb]

Absolute fiction.

Just do the math. They say they have reviewed 1.7 million videos. If we assume the average video is 2 mins long, then it would take 6 people working in 8 hour shifts around the clock 365 days a year, 3 years to properly review the videos.

Obviously, for some, just a few seconds will reveal the infringement, but ones like Rook's you would have to review the entire video carefully and have a pretty strong know,edge of the company's library to identify infringment.

[RooIG]

Do the math based on figures that you pulled out of your butt? No thanks - too stinky.

What on earth makes you think that Viacom has only 6 people working on this for 8 hours a day? It's probably many multiples of that.

Not everyone's a start-up. Some companies have the ability to throw lots of staff at projects like this.

[CyR00k]

Read the letter from Viacom to the mother of the dancing infant. In their mind the "evidence" that they had was a good faith belief that the video was infringing. The term good faith belief is far too vague, the media companies obviously believe that whatever they claim to be infringement is actually infringement. It just doesn't happen fit with reality.

There is nothing to compel Viacom, et al, to bother with actually checking to see if something truly is copyright infringement.

I also have a problem with the statements that Viacom made, in the letter they claimed that it was a mistake made by their staff. However, in the court proceedings they said that it wasn't their job to determine if something is covered under fair use. So which one of these is true?

[Lerianis]

You have a point. A 'good faith belief' is way too lenient with Viacom and others. It should be an absolute belief, after review of the entire thing in question, that something is infringing on copyright.

[CyR00k]

Read the letter from Viacom to the mother of the dancing infant. In their mind the "evidence" that they had was a good faith belief that the video was infringing. The term good faith belief is far too vague, the media companies obviously believe that whatever they claim to be infringement is actually infringement. It just doesn't happen fit with reality.

There is nothing to compel Viacom, et al, to bother with actually checking to see if something truly is copyright infringement.

I also have a problem with the statements that Viacom made, in the letter they claimed that it was a mistake made by their staff. However, in the court proceedings they said that it wasn't their job to determine if something is covered under fair use. So which one of these is true?

[perfgeek]

Even beyond looking at the numbers, unless there was a transcription and proofreading error at CNET... which in and of itself would be mildly pathetic...

'"Viacom has no alternative accept to repeatedly search the entire YouTube library," the letter continued.'

If Viacom and their lawyers cannot be bothered to proofread their own correspondence...

[Vampyre82nd]

Here is the issue, the recording companies are stuck in an old mind set and business model. They want to still be able to absolutely control how their music/video is used, listened to or played. You see, in the olden days the companies told the radio stations what songs to play and when, they controlled what went on the record/tape/8 track, how they were sold and they controlled the artist from sun up to sun down.

Sorry old dudes. That time has passed and until you get your head around that fact, your just going to be beating it to a bloody pulp on the wall of yesteryear.

In this newfangled day where any one with a computer is producer/recording artist/distributor and a disk is released in the store after it was leaked to web months ago (by your own people of course), already made the rounds of the PVP, and is on every kids ipod; you can not be complaining that your company is going under because of it. Pull your head out of the dark hole and come up with a new way of running the company. I mean we all saw how well the law suits worked for your PR when you started suing 80 year olds for down loading Puff Daddy (like any of them had a clue who that was anyway) off of the original Napster.

I mean here is an idea, why not bow down and kiss Steve Jobs dirty sneakers and beg him to allow you to post the albums to itunes and the other on line music stores (really are there any other ones). It would actually save you some money. You would be able to close down all the company owned music stores saving you millions, you would help the environment by not producing all the plastic that just ends up in the land fills after the disk is loaded on to the ipods, again saving millions in production fees, and lastly you would not have to pay all those BMW driving layers to go to court to sue grandma.