Business Week - YouTube and Intellectual Property
Excerpts and Highlights:
Questions had been swirling for months about whether the upstart, which now dishes up 100 million daily videos, was crossing copyright boundaries by letting its members upload videos with little oversight. What was surprising was that it was an individual who fired the first shot -- Robert Tur, an independent photographer famous for filming the 1992 Los Angeles riots -- instead of a big Hollywood studio or major music label.
Tur's lawsuit shows the fine line that YouTube is walking as it attempts to build its business model. Tur is suing because his videos of the riot and other events were uploaded without his permission. Although lawyers agree that YouTube should be protected by copyright law as long as it responds to content owners' requests to take down their works, it entered uncharted territory when it recently began adding ads next to search results. The law prohibits a site from benefiting financially from infringement, but the company argues that it's protected since it doesn't sell ads against individual videos. Still, the courts haven't set clear boundaries. "There has to be some way to make money with advertising that doesn't deprive you of the safe harbor. But where that line is, no one really knows," says Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Major media companies are executing a delicate dance with YouTube. The 17-month-old site now accounts for an astonishing 60% of all videos watched online. NBC and E! Entertainment are working with YouTube to promote select clips. And NBC has set up communications with YouTube to expedite the removal of its copyrighted material. Meantime, the music industry is pairing takedown notices with licensing discussions. Barring success there, however, lawsuits are still a possibility, says a music executive.
Indie video producers who don't have a battery of lawyers are learning just how freewheeling YouTube can be. They complain that removing clips is onerous. The time lag whittles into an audience that can rapidly build -- and disappear -- for short clips. It took eight months for Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz to mastermind a now iconic Web video that shows them creating intricate fountains of soda by dropping 500 Mentos into 100 2-liter bottles of Diet Coke. The video became an instant hit after it was published in June on Revver, a service that shares ad revenue. Within days, bootlegs showed up on Google (GOOG ) and YouTube. Voltz, a civil litigation lawyer, figured out the process for getting the videos removed. But as copies kept reappearing, Voltz learned that he had to keep contacting YouTube to take down each new version.
