
YouTube's original sin - mattyb
http://www.slate.com/id/2249124/pagenum/all/
======
rmorrison
It strikes me as funny that Eric Schmidt _"rarely saves anything; after he
reads an important message, the CEO sends it straight to the trash."_

Since, you know, his company is responsible for preserving many things that
people wish they could delete. Well, maybe "If You Have Something That You
Don't Want Anyone To Know, Maybe You Shouldn't Be Doing It In The First Place"

------
Splines
Do you think Youtube's founders are thinking "we should adhered to copyright
material more closely", or "we should have deleted all those emails"?

Both sides have a point here (content creators deserve to be compensated, or
at least not not-compensated, vs. youtube helped expose media to people who
would never have seen/heard some content before).

IMHO, I'd like to think that youtube made reasonable decisions in the past
(take down full movies, tv shows). I certainly don't have the data, but I
would hope that youtube helped popularized and spread videos that would never
have done so otherwise (e.g., numa numa, rickroll).

~~~
kiba
_(content creators deserve to be compensated, or at least not not-compensated,
vs. youtube helped expose media to people who would never have seen/heard some
content before)._

People should only have the right to earn one's profits in voluntary exchange.
The reason for this is very pragmatic.

The free market will not work without artists starving on the street, or
taking a part time job to support their art career. Failure in enterprises and
dreams is critical to the free market's ability to allocate resource.

The failure of firms quite often become signal to the rest of the market on
what not to do. With every failure of a speculation, a business idea, a poor
execution, lead further to correct information about consumer's preference and
perhaps, the future.

However, the future is very uncertain. Consumers' preference are fickle.
Sometime unforeseeable natural events happen. For that reason, speculation,
and thus entrepreneurship is a constant activity. Our economic system is a
dynamic one, and thus, cannot have an equilibrium that is so often at heart of
economic models.

For the reason of satisfying consumer preferences, we must ignore people who
insists and demand compensation for their work without giving people a reason
to buy.

If that mean breaking the law and ignoring copyright, so be it. If it means
that the music industry shrink to 10% of its former size, so be it. If that
mean more musicians working at restaurants, so be it.

Why should they make people fork money over something that they would not buy
without copyright and government intervention?

~~~
Splines
Maybe you understood me, but what I meant to say was that if you were to watch
something on youtube in lieu of going to the movie theater or watching it on
TV, you would be not compensating an artist because of youtube's existence.

It's a very optimistic view that people would compensate artists if it was a
purely optional choice (not saying that it doesn't happen, but it requires a
certain mix of artistic work, artist, and audience to make it happen).

That said, it's not entirely the fault of the audience that they are now
receiving works of "art" for free. The fact that technology has progressed to
the point where duplication of content has become trivial cannot be ignored
(whether or not it's right doesn't really change things). It's partially up to
the content creators to seek compensation from the audience in new ways.
Youtube, I think, is trying to enable this path, whether or not it's
successful has yet to be seen.

By no means do I think that people deserve compensation, but I do think that
piracy has had an impact on content creators' livelihood.

~~~
kiba
_By no means do I think that people deserve compensation, but I do think that
piracy has had an impact on content creators' livelihood._

I would argue that pirates are _market failure_ caused by government policies
and intervention. They fill in the missing void of the distribution system.

In a world without copyright law, publishing houses would learn very quick on
how to starve these legal pirates very quick.

This is exactly what happens to American publishers selling British books in
the 19th century, as there were no copyright treaty with Britain back then.
They would flood the market with cheap books, destroying much of the profit
potential that could be garnered by legally pirating the books.

This is good for Americans, because they can raise their literacy rate with
the help of cheap books. The British authors also make money, sometime more
than they do in their own country. Their business models consist of auctioning
or selling the manuscript to the highest bidder.

Even now, Americans publishers can make quite a bit money selling public
domain books, often government book like the 9/11 commission report.

Even so, I don't really care either way if a copyright-free world cause less
books to appear, or more books to appears. If I want more books, I either
download them or buy them. I see no reason to fret over what is ultimately a
business model or entrepreneurship problem.

~~~
driax
With ebooks coming out the cost of distribution of books drop to zero, leaving
zero money in the hands of authors.

Can't really see how we would do without something like copyright.

~~~
prodigal_erik
Patronage. <http://www.schneier.com/paper-street-performer.html>. Work for
hire. Nobody can copy a work you haven't made yet.

~~~
seertaak
Great -- so here he we are in the 21st century, with the wonderful new
empowering technology that is the internet, and you're saying that as far as
art is concerned, we should go back to the seventeenth century.

Reality check: you can't finance or organize an album or single launch across
30+ countries using a patronage system. It just won't work. To claim patronage
is the solution to the woes of the music and publishing industries is naive,
I'm afraid.

~~~
prodigal_erik
Here we are in the 21st century, with the capacity to give every internet user
complete unfettered access to an unimaginably vast library of literary and
artistic work. But we refuse to do it, we _impose restrictions_ on our tools
to create completely artificial scarcity, solely because we're stuck on an
18th century business model for creators that barely worked when the printing
press was novel and rare—and is now more of a lottery than a vocation.

------
lyudmil
"While no one looks good here, YouTube's founders come off particularly
poorly."

In the legal sense, I would agree that YouTube's founders may be in trouble.
However, the statement (like a lot of the rest of the article) sounds
qualitative, and I take issue with that. The underlying problem is that
copyright law doesn't work and YouTube's founders know it. They didn't have
respect for stupid legislation and therefore pushed it as far as they could
without getting in trouble.

I think it's imperative that lawsuits such as this aren't seen as a search for
right or wrong. It's two giant corporations arguing about dollars and cents,
so typical ethical standards we use when dealing with humans do not apply.

~~~
seertaak
I'm a musician (and ex-hacker), whence I've been following this case with some
interest. I take issue with your statement that 'copyright law doesn't work'.
It doesn't work precisely because of a^sh%les like Messrs. Hurley and Chen,
who each ended up with hundred-million-dollar windfalls (no doubt now being
spent on the same types of goods and servces, e.g. cocaine and hookers, that
many here seem to accuse musicians and music execs of indulging in), largely
off the back of content creators who didn't receive a dime for their efforts.

That is a true injustice when you look at the plight of EMI, which has brought
us Coldplay, Pink Floyd, the Beatles (to name only a few), and which is close
to going into administration. EMI actually gave back money (however
imperfectly) to the people who were responsible for creating the music and
associated content -- the artists, the producers, the mixing engineers, the
mastering engineers, the graphic artists, etc. Tell me _what the fuck_ has
YouTube or Google done for any of these people?

Or if you look at the Spanish music industry, for which recorded music sales
in 2010 where _one sixth of the level in 2000_. Filesharing, YouTube, etc.,
have effectively wiped that industry off the map. I lived two years in Madrid
when I was a teenager (94-96), and I had the pleasure of listening to
indigenous rock and indie music like Extremoduro, Ska-P, Seguridad Social.
Spanish youths of today won't have that pleasure, thanks to filesharing and
companies like YouTube -- to say nothing of the plight of Spanish musicians.
Ten years ago, Spanish music accounted for dozens of entries in the Spanish
top 50. Now, there are virtually none.

Let's be totally clear: YouTube didn't receive billions of dollars from Google
for the cute homemade videos of cats or the like. It received that money for
the illegal content it hosted. Granted, they created some value for the
consumer in that they gave the _user_ the control of the programming, but the
value-creation component is a tiny sliver of the total value: what really
happened is a transfer of wealth from content creators to middlemen like
YouTube, who did nothing except host a few PHP and Flash scripts on some
servers.

Again: copyright law doesn't work because of agents like YouTube continually
acting to undermine it for personal enrichment. To the extent that we
vigorously pursue persons like this (and I include private filesharers in this
category, even though their form of profiteering takes a more subtle
'opportunity cost' form), the law _will begin to work_. Do you think there
would be no theft in Portobello Market if there weren't bobbies on the beat --
simply because everyone acknowledged the law against theft is not 'stupid'?

> They didn't have respect for stupid legislation

To make a claim like that, without any qualification or explanation, is, well,
stupid. Copyright law, of some form or other, has existed for some four
hundred years -- it takes some chutzpah to write off the whole legal edifice
as stupid.

Music videos and music, incidentally, were one of the content types which
Hurley et al. passed a blind eye to, and they seem to do it to this day. The
lawsuit details efforts by Viacom to have make YouTube (and Google) filter
illegal content automatically -- Google and YouTube refused to filter unless
this they entered one-sided licensing deals. In other words, they held a gun
to their head, in effect saying: either make a deal on our terms, or we're
going to pass a blind eye to piracy. I don't care what you say, this is
unethical, and I applaud the mainstream media for finally calling this out.

And I hope they screw Hurley et al. to a wall.

~~~
lyudmil
You are correct to point out I didn't explain or qualify why I think copyright
law is stupid. I wrongly assumed I was preaching to the converted. Let me
waive my hands a little and try to provide a motivation without going into too
much detail.

In general, copyright protections are government-granted monopolies. This
creates a number of economic inefficiencies. One example is distribution -
instead of money and labor being spent to distribute recorded music and
movies, all of this could be done for free over the Internet.

Of course, there must be mechanisms by which people who create content get
compensated for their work. Copyright rarely works well in this regard (I
think you said it did it "imperfectly"). The truth is most musicians make most
of their money through touring, advertising deals, etc. Therefore, they would
benefit from a wider distribution of their work, which copyright law impedes.
There are people working on alternative models whose work you could read if
you want to look for ways around these kinds of paradoxes. The big obstacle to
implementing more progressive policies are the hugely powerful private content
providers, so framing the issue as YouTube's billionaire owners versus the
independent artist is disingenuous.

Regardless whether you agree with what I've said above, what cannot be denied
is that individuals are still able to download all the pirated content they
want very easily. Therefore, copyright law's greatest flaw is that it has been
demonstrated not to work. Reforming or scrapping it would allow the market to
adapt and move to a more sane model, which would benefit both the consumer and
the content generator rather than the content "owner" and the content
distributor.

~~~
seertaak
> In general, copyright protections are government-granted monopolies.

 _All_ property rights secured by anything other than private physical force
are 'government granted'. Can I hear some outrage over the government granted
monopoly that allows me to sleep in my flat at night without fear that someone
stronger than me (not difficult!) will come and kick me out? No, I didn't
think so :)

> One example is distribution - instead of money and labor being spent to
> distribute recorded music and movies, all of this could be done for free
> over the Internet.

I log into Spotify or iTunes and download the music over the internet; zero
physical distribution cost. I pay for the intellectual property -- where is
the inefficiency?

Also, remember that distribution is _only one aspect_ of the the music
business. You're totally ignoring _promotion_ , which requires both effort and
money. Money which is only available if the intellectual property is
monetizable, namely through copyright protections. There _is no other way_.

> The truth is most musicians make most of their money through touring,
> advertising deals, etc.

That is only true now _precisely because of_ rampant piracy. It wasn't true in
the 80s, when e.g. Michael Jackson sold 100MM+ copies of Thriller at $20 a
pop. Or in the early noughties when Coldplay records would sell 25MM records
-- their latest record sold 2MM copies. Touring and merchandise are really
only lucrative for very few lucky and largely legacy acts -- pick up a copy of
Music Week, look at the concert gross tables and see for yourself.

> There are people working on alternative models whose work you could read if
> you want to look for ways around these kinds of paradoxes.

With due respect, I think these people are producing nothing more than hot
air. If they are so sure about their new eldorado business models, then let
them put their money where their mouth is, and invest in creating Music
Industry 2.0. I, for one, wouldn't invest a dime in such ventures.

> hugely powerful private content providers

I think you overestimate their power -- after all, we've had _ten years_ of
_rampant piracy_ , haven't we? With all their power, they haven't been able to
do anything to stop it. Meanwhile, in China, authorities have absolutely
managed to control the dissemination of content and information, so it's
clearly technically feasible. (Not that I'm advocating a China-style system of
control and censorship, of course!)

> Therefore, copyright law's greatest flaw is that it has been demonstrated
> not to work.

The only reason it hasn't worked is because there hasn't been any enforcement!
I would have thought that's the whole point of this article and this thread --
holding those that profiteer from flagrant violation of the law accountable.
Holding the Chad Hurleys of the world accountable. Confiscating their ill-
gotten gains would send a powerful message to those who would use a cavalier
attitude to copyright holders in order to allow their site to grow and in turn
make millions from it. In order for the law to be respected, it needs to be
enforced. And in order for the law to be enforced requires _political will_.
And this, sadly, has been in short supply, although the recent developments
(e.g. Obama's endorsement of ACTA, Three-strikes rule in France, Lord
Mandelson's Digital Millenium Copyright Act, etc.) are encouraging.

I apologize if I sound combative -- I talk like a content creator and you
appear to talk like a consumer (it's similar to the hearing disputes between
creditors and debtors -- they seem to talk past each other). However, I think
in the long run, the content creators will prevail, because the simple truth
is that we're right. Having your personal skin fully in it has a way of
sharpening your wit and galvanizing your motivation, you see.

------
johnrob
The current system encourages companies to use copyrighted material get a
foothold in the market. There's no real penalty for having an unknown website
full of unauthorized content.

