

Imagine There's No YouTube - jchrisa
http://jchrisa.net/drl/_design/sofa/_show/post/Imagine-There-s-No-YouTube

======
cemerick
I love couchdb and what jchrisa is doing there, but this wrong on a variety of
levels IMO.

First, on a practical level, no one wants to deal with hosting anything, let
alone "civilians", so billions of web servers on the edge of the network is
simply a no-go unless and until doing so becomes appliance-esque (which will
necessitate provisioning of backups and failover using...wait for it...third
party services that could only exist given safe-harbor provisions.).

Second, 99% of users and cumulative usage time is spent consuming, not
producing stuff.

Third, this is just crazy:

"""The online content farms profit based on the fact that it's hard to share
your own content, yourself, via a means of production that you control. This
is the central fact free-speech activists should be upset about."""

There's oodles of places to go that will host your stuff far better than
YouTube et al. can, but most people don't care enough to pay for it. Go to
vimeo, pay whatever trifling sum they charge these days, and you'll have all
the control you want, a better experience to boot, and all the free speech you
can muster.

~~~
janl
So you're saying you're not willing to "imagine"? :)

If it weren't for Alan Kay we'd be all using DOS prompts on our iPhones (oh
wait… :) and that was in the early 70s.

~~~
cemerick
I can imagine very well, I would just rather not have that vision tied up with
advocating the elimination of safe-harbor provisions.

By all means, let us all become publishers, hosts, etc. etc. Maybe an
enterprising someone can make that easier and more attractive than the current
regime. :-)

~~~
pyre
I don't think that you read that post very well. He's not advocating the
elimination of safe-harbor provisions. He's advocating the limitation of who
they apply to. It's debatable whether that's a good or a bad thing, but we
have to at least be on the same page to have a decent debate on the issue.

~~~
dantheman
I'd say youtube in that case would be the landord for the page that holds the
video and the creator of the video would be responsible for it. To say that a
web host or postal office isn't responsible but that message board is
arbitrary.

Also craigslist would obviously fall under a the youtube designtion -- and
other such services that require scale.

~~~
rosser
It's not arbitrary at all. To continue with the bar analogy, YouTube is the
bar owner, and the person uploading the video is the bartender who mixed your
drink. The landlord in YouTube's case is Google, who, by virtue of the fact
that they also own the bar, rather than merely renting space to the party that
does, has to assume liability for what happens in the bar.

In the case of EC2, Amazon owns the building, and lets a space to you, to do
with more or less what you will. If that happens to be running a bar that
serves underage drinkers, how is that their responsibility?

Edited to add: Except, of course, in the case where they've been notified that
you are, in fact, serving underage customers. Most leases have verbiage that
allows the lessor to break the agreement and boot your ass if you're using the
space to break the law. That's how they qualify for safe harbor.

~~~
kelnos
Yes, it's quite arbitrary. The bar analogy sucks. (Most analogies suck.)

The only difference between YouTube and Amazon EC2 is flexibility of purpose.
You can do many different things with an EC2 account because it was designed
to let you do those things. You can upload videos to a YouTube account and not
much more because YT was designed to do one thing well.

What they have in common is that they are both hosting services and apps
platforms. They both host your data and applications. The fact that the
"window" into EC2 from the outside is whatever the account holder wants it to
be, whereas the window into YT is just YT's interface... is totally
irrelevant.

The bottom line is that both Amazon and YouTube are hosting your data on their
servers, and allowing you to present that data to the public at large. If one
of them is responsible for legality of your content, then both of them must
be.

------
tolmasky
I think what this article don't realize is that Italy's ruling is BENEFICIAL
to large corporations, not some sort of "equalizing" factor. Every time some
sort of ridiculous regulation has been put in place the big corporations have
had the capital to comply, and the individuals have been given even more
roadblocks to compete. The lack of imagination is not in not imagining a peer
to peer web, but rather in not imagining a Google that can innovate around
these restrictions.

Take this safe harbor thing. Let's say that it becomes abolished for sites
like YouTube across the board. Do you think Google would say "oh too bad, time
to shut down the site". Of course not. Google has the money to pay for a
million mechanical-turk style people to view every video, and the innovative
prowess to create programs that would do filtering as well. The end result
would be that they would probably err on the side of being too cautious, and
we'd have a YouTube with far less content.

However, the true problem here is that if I now wanted to compete with
YouTube, it would be impossibly difficult due solely to the liability of it
all. I can't afford to have a huge staff looking at every video, or massive
servers running analysis on every upload. So all of a sudden what you've done
is SOLIDIFY YouTube's stranglehold on content.

Not to mention that you've all of a sudden given Google the perfect excuse for
denying any content they want, they can now just hide behind "liability
concerns". We've already seen that companies abuse DMCA takedowns with fair
use, of course there would be abuse of this as well.

~~~
Osmose
This is why I think the author supports the idea of giving the power to share
videos to everyone, rather than the current model of having someone else share
your videos for you once you upload them. You certainly can afford to know
that the videos you alone share are legal or not.

It's not about making a competing service, its about self-service.

------
jdminhbg
Beyond the hand-waving about "big industry" and "corporate agendas," there's
not much here beyond the willingness to endorse authoritarianism in the
service of encouraging the style of internet sharing the author prefers.

More serious is the apparent blitheness with which the author assumes that
only big companies will be affected by speech regulations. On the contrary,
it's normally small operators who are intimidated into shutting down by speech
regulations like DMCA or the late, unlamented COPA. The Google in Italy case
is newsworthy precisely because the government there bullied an entity with
the resources to try to fight back.

~~~
jchrisa
So you'd rather be protected by the feudal lord (Google) than stand on your
own? Make no mistake that's what you're saying.

~~~
jdminhbg
No, I'm saying it's highly unlikely that the "king" is going to shut down the
"feudal lord" and then let me, the "peasant," do whatever I want to.

~~~
jchrisa
You shouldn't be able to do whatever you want. Unless you only want to do good
things. Law isn't perfect but it is meant to be applied impartially.

~~~
Semiapies
What about the things that aren't "good", but aren't _harmful_ to anyone -
things like lolcats and blog posts about how the whole web should be running
out of home servers? Shouldn't people be able to do those?

~~~
kelnos
We're not talking about Italy's hatred of a lolcats video. We're talking about
a video of 3 kids taunting an autistic kid. If someone put that video on their
home server and showed it to the world, they'd (hopefully) be just as liable
as if they put it on YouTube.

If Italy is fine with lolcats on YT, presumably they'd be fine with lolcats on
my home server.

~~~
Semiapies
Your reply isn't actually to what I said, but I'll respond to you:

The video is not the harm; the original taunting is. If it's a manner of
protecting a minor, we can talk about pulling the video down.

If the kids were selling the video and making money off it, we can talk about
prosecuting them.

~~~
kelnos
Why is making money off of something the threshold for prosecution? Is the
video (or the act itself) somehow less harmful to someone when it isn't
commercially viable?

------
mortenjorck
This reminds me of the position a very good friend of mine tends to defend,
that we'd all be better off if we lived hunter-gatherer lifestyles. None of
the stresses of the modern world to constrain us, no sitting at a desk for
most of the day, no growth hormones in our food, no complex economy founded on
unrealistic debt, no unavoidable, unsustainable network of high-volume
petroleum combustion to poison our rivers and lungs.

Despite his having a couple of degrees in anthropology and talking about this
long before Avatar was ever in theaters... I remain unconvinced. Even without
all the mundane problems of modern life, most of us in the developed world
don't have to worry about our immediate survival on a day-to-day basis.
Society may have made an enormous number of tradeoffs to get to where we are,
but I still have to call it a net positive.

That's kind of how I feel about this article.

~~~
madebylaw
_most of us in the developed world don't have to worry about our immediate
survival on a day-to-day basis_

Neither do hunters and gatherers. Turns out that hunter gatherers (at least
the ones surveyed) just sit around most days and rarely worry about their
immediate survival either. If you're interested in more information, this is a
seminal work for anthropologists studying this topic:

<http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm>

I would agree that, for me, life in modern society is a net positive, but that
is a personal decision shaped by my own cultural biases. Is modern society
inherently better than a hunter gatherer one? No, I don't think so.

~~~
dantheman
I think that modern society is inherently better since no one lives the hunter
gatherer one when given a chance. There are still places where one could go
and hunt/gather food etc but I don't know of anyone that does that.

~~~
madebylaw
Most modern hunter gatherers wouldn't want to live in modern society either.
See the Sahlins' paper above or a recent National Geographic article on a
similar group:

<http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/12/hadza/finkel-text>

Again, if modern society was inherently better, why are there modern hunter
gatherers at all? Shouldn't they all have joined us by now? It is not for lack
of opportunity. They like their culture and their lifestyles. They don't want
to join us as much as we don't want to join them.

------
freetard
Big entities are still good on the web, see wikipedia, openstreetmap and yes,
even youtube, liveleak or twitter/identi.ca (iran, scandals etc).

This case could also help many torrent sites to survive
[http://torrentfreak.com/can-google-secure-a-safe-haven-
for-b...](http://torrentfreak.com/can-google-secure-a-safe-haven-for-
bittorrent-sites-100225) . Where I live there is no netflix, no itunes, no
hulu. And most people wouldn't have the money for those anyway. So torrent
sites play a great role in democratizing culture (good and bad culture I
know).

------
jdietrich
Dude is all kinds of confused. It looks to me like he's trying to create an
intellectual justification for his emotional dislike of big websites. I can't
fathom a legitimately rational explanation for why EC2 is right and proper and
good, but YouTube et al are evil and should be hounded out of business by
force of law. They both provide essentially the same service, it's just that
YouTube make it accessible to everyone.

Sounds like fairly straightforward neo-luddite snobbery to me, the same kind
of thinking that made all those Whole Foods customers so angry at Wal-Mart for
selling organic vegetables. I think his real agenda is that he wants to turn
back the clock to before the Eternal September and take us back to a geek-only
internet. I think he resents all of the ordinary people and their cat videos.

Also, no fully peer-to-peer architecture can serve content with low enough
latency for web browsing (as Freenet so ably demonstrates) and none ever will
because of Parkinson's Law, but that's largely beside the point.

------
dangrossman
In this "personal web" where everyone hosts their own content on their own web
server, how do we as content consumers continue to find the 100 cat videos a
day we want to watch? Someone's going to have to aggregate them from around
the world, there's too much to aggregate by hand, and then we're in the same
position we are now. Merely linking to the wrong material is enough to get you
convicted in the USA, so there's no protection in that the files linked to are
now on many servers -- the aggregator has the same risk as in the industrial
web.

~~~
loup-vaillant
Links probably should have safe harbour anyway, because there is no way to
control the other end of the link. So your lolcat could be find via a search
engine, or other aggregation service you may have subscribed to.

------
dantheman
So I agree with the intent of the article that pushing distribution to the
edge is a noble goal. But safe-harbors should be expanded -- why should a
company have to police it's users. That seems ridiculous. If the country feels
something is wrong it should send a letter or police officer to make sure that
it is taken down, but that is all.

------
wvenable
The article glosses over a significant part of Google's argument: "To be
clear, none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video.
They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know
the people involved or were even aware of the video's existence until after it
was removed."

Why exactly where these people charged with anything? What kind of ridiculous
law is this? I feel this has less to do with free speech and internet freedom
than it does with common sense.

------
archgoon
Question, if I host a blog, am I responsible for all comments on the blog?
Does this mean that all comments must be held for moderation before they are
posted?

This would kill hacker news and a large number of other sites, and is not
solved by self-hosting.

~~~
natrius
Everyone could host their own comments, and blogs would only accept links as
comments on their posts.

    
    
      </sarcasm>

~~~
Semiapies
Judging by cases in a few countries, bloggers would _then_ be responsible for
anything on the page at that link.

If you reversed that, with commentors posting comments with links to the post,
you'd then need aggregation to read comments, making aggregator sites and
software makers vulnerable.

It doesn't really stop until we devolve down to a pre-search engine web. But
since "we" will be reshaping things, that'll be all good, right?

------
ekiru
One of the potential advantages of the large UGC platforms like Youtube is as
a risk pool. Would it be easier for me to fight off an attempt to censor me,
or would it be easier for Google to fight off an attempt to censor their
users? Note that I'm not saying these platforms necessarily do perform this
function, but many do to at least some extent. The thing that bothers me most
about this case is that Google seem to have provided Italian law enforcement
with the personal information of the criminals. Could you imagine the outcry
that would happen if there were a case where AT&T kept recordings of some
one's phone calls and used those recordings to turn that person over to the
police after the police somehow discovered that some one(without even knowing
who specifically they are looking for) was using an AT&T phone as part of
criminal activities? Obviously, most people will accept some amount of
wiretapping, but I'd expect fewer people to accept either this hypothetical
situation or the situation with Google in Italy.

------
wedesoft
Decentralising social networks, hosting, and search is desirable.

But I can't see anything positive in the decision of the Italian court.
Remember this is Italy. It's Berlusconi's country. And the guy is hellbent on
eradicating independent media. He won't stop at shutting down Youtube.

Being able to anonymously publish stuff is a _very_ important aspect of the
freedom of speech!

------
hmarquardt
Gosh, I'm willing to imagine ... and yes if it were easy to generate quality
content, index-able, search-able and security issues didn't require admin
level skills to publish devolving to peer based sharing would be great ...

But the aggregators exist because the content consumers want consistency, ease
of discovery and all the admin heavy lifting done for them ...

~~~
jchrisa
Good work imagining! Now go make something! Building tools for the personal
web is no harder than writing a Hacker News clone. It just requires more
imagination.

------
dpatru
Youtube wants to have the right to profit from the contents of its service,
but it doesn't want to be held responsible for damages the content causes.

A landlord who leases his premises to the bar owner for a fixed sum per month
is not responsible for the behavior of drunk customers. He's just renting the
premises. But the bar owner who makes money on the drinks should be
responsible.

The law should assign responsibility to Youtube in a similar way. If Youtube
is merely a "landlord" it should not be held responsible for copyright
infringement. If, however, it profits from the individual videos that are
uploaded, it's hard to see why it should not also bear the loss caused by
copyright infringement.

------
jrockway
What's good about the Internet is that it's global. That means that if one
country or one group of countries tries to censor something, the host can
always be moved elsewhere. Since we have things like Tor now, censoring the
Internet itself is not possible; you can only go after individual violators.
And if those are outside of the law, you just have to deal with them --
nothing can be done to stop it.

On that note, clearly we should just launch a satellite that beams youtube
videos to everyone. Since shooting down a satellite is illegal under various
international laws, this should be a safe place to host your autotuned
lolcats.

------
asnyder
I believe Opera is trying this concept in their latest web browser,
<http://unite.opera.com/>, although I don't think it's gaining much traction.
I believe they're bundling an easy to use web server where you can self hosts
and share your content, media, etc.

------
ErrantX
The simple answer: if YouTube and other similar sites didn't exist. We may not
have had some of the major innovations of the last 10 years

definitely independant music would be way behind where it is now.

~~~
Semiapies
When people fall prey to one-true-wayism (as the article does), they wipe out
a lot of possibilities.

------
jarsj
If police can walk inside your hotel and stop people from breaking laws, they
should be able to do at your website.

What we should build is a universally accepted protocol for government
policing. Every UGC website must implement it. The government gets some police
accounts which they can use to block objected content. Every government
manages their jurisdiction. There can be treaties and smart organizations like
NSA who do things automatically.

May be futuristic, but it will happen.

~~~
shrughes
No they shouldn't, simply because police shouldn't be able to enforce immoral
laws. If there were a morality field generator that magically allowed only the
enforcement of morally sound laws within their sphere of operation, it would
be a good idea to build a bunch of them and turn them on.

~~~
jarsj
If companies can than why not the police?

There would be guidelines and you could take them to court for breaking them.
There will be new sections in the law and new court judgments to base actions
upon. It would evolve. Let there be a special department trained and
specialized in this.

All I am saying is pass the onus to government and give them a way to do it.

------
metamemetics
Summary:

1) "Hating facism is too cliche"

2) "waaahhhh-big-evil-corporations"

3) "I miss animated GIFs and rainbow borders, grandma needs to handcraft an
impossible-to-find-pre-web1pointOh site for her cat videos and not use
EvilTube. Will be way cool."

------
malkia
If it wasn't for Jackson's tit, it would've been... (Read the YouTube story).

------
teamfresh
no YouTube - just MeTube =)

