Copyright Law In The YouTube Era
April 6, 2007, 8:12pm
As part of it’s ETech conference last month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation hosted a debate about copyright law as it relates video-sharing sites like YouTube and specifically Viacom’s billion-dollar lawsuit against YouTube for copyright infringement. The participants in the debate: Internet entrepreneur Mark Cuban and EFF’s Fred von Lohmann.
“We know if we keep on going and going and going, there’s no end to it,” Cuban said of actions that he perceives as copyright infringements made possible by Internet services like YouTube. “So unless you set the ground rules to respect copyright at some level, people just aren’t ever going to respect it. … It, in fact, induces people to disrespect copyright … particularly with YouTube because it’s the legitimacy of Google applied to infringement.”
Von Lohmann’s response: “For me, [Viacom’s lawsuit is] not quite about YouTube. It’s a fight for a larger precedent” and for the “safe harbors” in digital copyright law that protect Internet hosts from legal liability for people who use their services.
See the whole debate here:
Categories: Technology, Intellectual Property
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