Monday, April 7, 2008
YouTube Case Study
The video webhosting site YouTube provides a service popular to many and frustrating to others. The balance between protected, copyrighted material and fair use reviews, parodies, etc. is always called into question in YouTube videos. YouTube, owned by Google, has made several attempts to avoid lawsuits by making agreements with large media companies regarding their protected material. However, this has not satisfied some media companies, and Viacom International sued Google YouTube last year for $1 billion in damages, arguing that YouTube was committing secondary copyright infringement. YouTube argued protection under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 and instituted the Video Identification System. The debate between YouTube's proper position in the copyright-fair use spectrum is yet to be settled.
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The service YouTube provides is one considered valuable to many young people, and our class is no exception. It was discussed that while media companies have a right to not want their copyrighted material distributed to mass audiences, YouTube has done a good job of censoring its videos as far as copyright infringement avoidance goes. Censoring their videos for other purposes, however, seems to be a lower priority.
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