Ed Felten posted an interesting bit from Viacom’s complaint against YouTube.

In addition, YouTube is deliberately interfering with copyright owners’ ability to find infringing videos even after they are added to YouTube’s library. YouTube offers a feature that allows users to designate “friends” who are the only persons allowed to see videos they upload, preventing copyright owners from finding infringing videos with this limitation…. Thus, Plaintiffs cannot necessarily find all infringing videos to protect their rights through searching, even though that is the only avenue YouTube makes available to copyright owners. Moreover, YouTube still makes the hidden infringing videos available for viewing through YouTube features like the embed, share, and friends functions. For example, many users are sharing full-length copies of copyrighted works and stating plainly in the description “Add me as a friend to watch.”

So in other words, private videos on YouTube are a big problem because they “could” contain copyrighted material and stupid Viacom wants that stopped because of the possibility, not even the reality.

How far are they going to take this?

via Boing Boing

Technorati Tags: copyright, dmca

This entry was posted on Friday, March 16th, 2007 at 7:27 am and is filed under Media Morons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.