6 ms·

YouTube's original sin

43 points by mattyb 17y ago

Splines 17y ago
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 17y ago
  (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?
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - Splines 17y ago
    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 17y ago
      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.
johnrob 17y ago
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.
rmorrison 17y ago
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"
lyudmil 17y ago
"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 17y ago
  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.

43 points by mattyb 17y ago

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 17y ago
(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?
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- Splines 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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.

johnrob 17y ago

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.

rmorrison 17y ago

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"

lyudmil 17y ago

"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 17y ago
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.