You make a platform really easy to illegaly carry live video and then skirt around the law because if you get caught in the act you nuke the feed. How awesome of you. If you looked at your site you could kill feeds left and right, they are obviously illegal. Why don't you do this? (Here's a guess--it would kill your business.)
Percentage wise I believe you that most of the content is user created. But attention wise it can't be close. Let's look at your "sports" section:
Right now there's a bootlegged feed of ESPN, a couple of soccer games you don't have the rights for and a variety of other content that is copyrighted. Those are the most viewed, your user generated content is being watched by no one.
You're running a scam.
(And for what it's worth, on the technical side I admire what you guys have done. I just think it's super shady to base your business on looking the other way when your users steal content. You're building an online cable network without paying for content.)
> If you looked at your site you could kill feeds left and right, they are obviously illegal. Why don't you do this? (Here's a guess--it would kill your business.)
Here's another guess: it would remove any hope of using common carrier status (or whatever the DMCA equivalent is called). Once you proactively identify infringing material, you become responsible for anything you don't remove, if I understand correctly. Taking on legal responsibility for any failure to notice a copyright-violating feed seems like a risk that a startup can't take.
"Finally, the service provider must not have knowledge that the material or activity is infringing or of the fact that the infringing material exists on its network."
I think part of being a DMCA compliant safe harbor is not knowing there is infringing material, if they remove stuff, that implies that they have the ability to know about the infringing material.
Not really, but even so a bunch of wrongs don't make a right.
Also in this case the wrongs make up the vast majority of viewed content. Live video is much harder to police from a content owner's perspective and they know it. The lawyers gotta be out documenting shit during an event. Look what they require to take something down:
All that for stuff that a ten year old could tell is stolen. I have no respect for startups that base themselves on theft.
I guess you're hoping that if you repeat this often enough we'll forget that copyright infringement isn't theft? Sadly, that will work on a fair percentage of folk, which is why I feel it's important to reply with something like this at least some of the time.
Not every other UGC site relies almost completely on plainly copyrighted content. Examples include: Wikipedia, Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket, WordPress, Yelp, etc. Scribd is a good example of a startup taking the JTV path and I think they are scum too.
They knowingly ignore massive copyright infringement. They have negligently let their service be overrun by copyright infringement. The primary use of justintv is for copyright infringement, the UGC content is secondary. Pretending their site is just another average UGC site is intellectually dishonest.
They have exactly the same copyright policy as any other UGC site. They take down infringing stuff when they're told about it.
What's intellectually dishonest is to pretend there's such a thing as an "average" UGC site. The others vary enormously in the amount of copyrighted stuff they have on them.
"They have exactly the same copyright policy as any other UGC site. They take down infringing stuff when they're told about it."
Looks like an Everybody Else Is Doing It argument. What makes "the same copyright policy as any other UGC site" morally acceptable? It's easy to read that as "we'll make money from your content until you catch us".
There can be identical policies that produce different results. For example, a startup telling you which intersections were best for hailing a cab could have the same TOS as one telling you the best intersections to score drugs; the latter would be more likely to assist in breaking the law.
Percentage wise I believe you that most of the content is user created. But attention wise it can't be close. Let's look at your "sports" section:
http://www.justin.tv/directory/sports
Right now there's a bootlegged feed of ESPN, a couple of soccer games you don't have the rights for and a variety of other content that is copyrighted. Those are the most viewed, your user generated content is being watched by no one.
You're running a scam.
(And for what it's worth, on the technical side I admire what you guys have done. I just think it's super shady to base your business on looking the other way when your users steal content. You're building an online cable network without paying for content.)