The Law and User Content

1. YouTube Copyright System Gone Mad, EFF Prepares to Sue
   http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2009/02/03/03readwriteweb-youtube_copyright_system_eff_action.html
2. EFF Legal Victories
   http://www.eff.org/victories/
3. Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig
   http://www.free-culture.cc/
4. YouTube, AP, Hurting Fair Use
   http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/02/05/youtube-ap-hurting-fair-use
   

YouTube's automated copyright violation identification system, ContentID, has gathered increased attention recently. As Lessig writes in his book, Free Culture, the decision about whether a work violates copyright or is "fair use" used to be made almost exclusively by people, usually a judge. Increasingly, however, this decision is made by computers. YouTube anxious to avoid lawsuits is inclined to take down any borderline content rather than "risk it." Indeed, even innovators/artists you have a legitimate fair use claim may be hesitant to distribute a video lest they be forced to prove that fair use claim--the cost of which is often so prohibitive that the content is more easily taken down.

The video mentioned in the NYT is of a young girl playing the piano and singing Winter Wonderland (a song which incidentally would be in the public domain, but for the US congress retroactively extending copyright in a somewhat constitutionally dubious way: see Eldred v. Ashcroft and the Copyright Term Extension Act).

As these decisions about fair use--whether in the case of user-content take down or digital copy protection on books, music, and movies--are increasingly made by uncompromising machines and not judges/humans. And as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits disabling copy protection technologies, a large part of our historically "free culture" is greatly threatened.

I highly recommend Lessig's book, which has an excellent discussion of what is at stake in this "copyright war".