Why would we be against it? I know it’s an unpopular opinion on HN, but I don’t have a problem with Facebook and Google being made liable for the content on the

Why would we be against it? I know it’s an unpopular opinion on HN, but I don’t have a problem with Facebook and Google being made liable for the content on their platforms. Here is why: if you produce content, like music, you can put it on YouTube and YouTube will pay you for the views. They’ll only pay you for the content in your channels though, while themselves earning money from both the legal and illegal copies. I’m not personally too worried about the privacy, people will always find a way to share, but the fact that YouTube makes money of the illegal content legally, just doesn’t sit right with me. What’s even worse is that YouTube won’t tell us the profit ratios on our own content. Sure they’ll pay a record company to put music videos on an official channel, but they’ll never disclose how much money YouTube earns from it. Maybe it’s a fair split, maybe it’s not, but you have no way of knowing and you kind of have to be on YouTube. I mean, this last bit is where it becomes obvious that viewers are the product, because we only upload stuff to YouTube because they have all the damn users. I know the fear machine, wants us to believe that private citizens wouldn’t be able to upload a video we filmed with a song playing in the background. But that’s actually already illegal. Only in its current form, it’s the private citizen who is liable and not the platform. I have no problem with switching that around, and make the platform liable instead of the individual. Maybe that will lead to more closed platforms, but my pets bet is that someone out there is willing to build a platform that allows the content and simply pays the royalties, for the same reason we accept the godawful YouTube contract. The users are valuable. In Denmark, Sweden and Estonia we prefer the government to Google or Facebook, so naturally we support laws that moves power from the companies to the people.