The “Secondary Liability” Theory on YouTube/iPhone

Talk about fishing for a story (on CNets part)!

Journalist is thinking “iPhone Hot + YouTube Hot + Copyright Hot” and the best he can come up with is “Maybe potential copyright problems for Apple with YouTube on the iPhone!”

Will tomorrows story be about how Apple are anti-competitive and under investigation for working with a monopoly because the iPhone defaults to using Google for web-search? (substitute with “Only supports getting weather/stock quotes from Yahoo or maps from Google”).

At least the talk about the anti-competitive practices of U.S. mobile carriers had some truth to it.

- ask

Perhaps the news hi tech of digital fingerprinting will eliminate this.

When one thinks of the people who appear in videos who never get compensated, such as: News videos, Man on the street Interviews, Audience Videos or Event Videos where guest are shown….. companies should be perspective about others getting some use of their output without direct compensation.

They certainly do not compensate all who appear in them.

This is crazy that Apple is getting the blame for this, they are just showing the content through Youtube not distributing it!!!!

The next logical step (by this reckoning) is to sue Mozilla and Microsoft for providing browsers that allow people to visit YouTube. A stupid idea from the land of the litigious lawyer.

I agree with Duncan. But why stop there, these hardly done-by copyright holders should go further then Microsoft and Mozilla. They should be after the real culprits: the electricity companies.

Hey, if they can sue Apple, then they can also sue Microsoft and Dell because their products also show YouTube videos. Why stop there, sue the power companies, and hospitals that facilitate the birth of copyright infringers.

Hey, let’s not stop there.

Why don’t the copyright holders sue everyone on the planet who owns or uses a PC? Then they should sue their parents for conceiving them.

Whoever dreamt up this hair-brained scheme of suing a company simply because it’s device is capable of displaying copyright material should be fired off into space on the next shuttle - with a one way ticket!

Let’s get right to the very root.

Sue God.

if god created us, aren’t our sins his fault?

While the PC analogy makes sense, I would go a different direction.

If I embed a YouTube or MySpace video into my blog am I then liable if it turns out that video is copyrighted?

@Jacob,

You are NOT liable for displaying video hosted by YouTube BUT when you are making $10M per month, TRUST me somebody will sue you.

Hahaha - they might as well sue Dell and IBM because their computers allow me to view YouTube as well. And let’s not forget that Sony flat screen monitor that let’s me view them…

Interesting.

I don’t know, I think Apple is doing this not so much for users to play YouTube videos on their iPhone, but that they upload videos from it to YouTube. Everybody talks about downloading things to mobile but a lot of people anticipate a huge market for people uploading things from handhelds to platforms, like Shozu (www.shozu.com) does with photos. It would make sense, given that few start ups are even thinking about this segment of the market but who knows.

chdhurley@yahoo.com

Youtube is one of the most popular video sharing sites on the net. A year ago, co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen were in between jobs, a pair of twentysomething geeks running up big credit card debts as they tooled around a garage trying to develop an easy way for people to share homemade videos on the Web.

Hurley says, “I do not want to work hard. I want to live a soft life. I want to sleep for three hours every afternoon and nine hours at night. I do not want to stay awake the whole day so that I can get a few 350 grand at the end of each month. I do not want my talents to be exploited by a ruthless employer. I am a lazy man. That is why I choose to live off the net. I am too lethargic to try and survive in the real world. That is why I did not bother to hold down a job though my credit card debt soared.

“On the net things are handed to me by Google. The idea of youtube came to me from a dinner party with a half-dozen friends in the greatest city in the world San Francisco. It was January, 2005, and we couldnt figure out a good solution. Sending the clips around by e-mail was a bust: The e-mails kept getting rejected because they were so big. Posting the videos online was a headache, too. So we created a site and put in basic software.

“What I and Steve came up with is a Web site, now called YouTube, that has become an Internet phenomenon. Show the honey and the bees will flock to it. We worked for about six hours each week in a garage like that Apple dude Steve Jobs for two months designing youtube. We had the idea to create a community around the video.

“Once that was done we knew that tons of millions of dollars would just flow into our laps after the Google buyour. We will not have to work hard. In the old economy you have to work really hard for a lousy promotion which might give you a few more grand if your employer is very generous. You have to get up early in the morning and run for a few 350 grand each month. On the net you can become rich without working hard.

“On the net once you have the idea you just sit at home and then magic will happen. That is exactly what happened at Paypal, Skype, MySpace, Facebook. The basic, simple to design software that I and Chen designed allows people to post almost anything they like on YouTube in minutes. People can jack off on porn. Now we are sitting at home retired early after the Google buyout. Content has been handed to us on a silver platter. We do not have to slog hard to create content like a poorly paid online journalist who makes a lousy 450k each year. We do not have to experience daily financial pressure
because our site does not get enough readers. We don’t have to worry about stress. We don’t have to worry about making a work life balance. It is easy for an Internet entrepreneur to enjoy life, as there is no concept called hard work in cyberspace. We are not under pressure to meet deadlines. We get up at ten in the morning and consider that to be hard work. We do not have to work for ten llllong years. That is the privilege of those in the old economy. They take the tube to go to work for a bum 350,000 dollar paycheck at the end of the month. I pity the people in the old economy who wear a lousy shirt and tie and go to work everyday. They are so serious it makes me laugh.

“We have it easy. The reason why we never held a job for more than a year was because we felt that a rope was attached to out necks. We would have had to stay chained in an office with four walls. It is such a pain to get up in the morning and run for the sake of a few 350 milli grand at the end of the month. The content that we offer is free. That is easy for us to that as we do not have to work to create it. Copyrighted work is there for our users to copy and paste as that is work which we have the right to copy. Other content
comes from common folk wanting to share stuff.

“Revenues will come from advertising. The net is a click and eyeballs business. Google understands this. All I had to do was make web users some crap. I had to keep it really, really simple and watch as the 400 million moronic teenagers flock to it. Forget about working hard for a a lousy 350 grand at the end of the month. That’s so old school.

“If you get the eyeballs you get the offer. You don’t have to be first, you just have to be simple and appeal to the web crowd. Then Google, the original ‘not first, but simple’ giant will write you a check. That’s the new business model. Figure out the next hot thing that you can make simple for the average web user (kids) and those two ugly dudes from Google Sergei Brin and Larry Page will send you a jet full of cash. It’s not about brains or talent or skill which I lack as I am a child of the Internet. It’s about timing and simplicity.

“The clicks come from youtube’s millions of eyeballs that we have not worked for. It is unearned traffic. We do not have to sweat and bleed for it. That is the privilege of poorly paid online journalists. I do not have to worry about losing my job, as my content does not get enough page views. I do not have to take the initiative about my own life. I do not have to discipline myself. I do not have to worry about having a career. The millions of youtube.com visitors will ensure that this will never happen. I can simply focus on trying to build relationships with my tall, tough women friends in San Francisco. We hang out together. We work out together. We watch films together like Letters from Iwo Jima, Inland Empire, Pan’s Labyrinth, Volver, Notes On A Scandal, Crank, An Inconvenient Truth, the Queen, Little Miss Sunshine, Apocalypto, Dreamgirls, The Pursuit Of Happyness We sleep in the afternoon together.”

Apple and youtube have a business agreement, I would say that theoretically would make apple liable since they are not consuming content but distributing it as a partner.

HOWEVER,

Not all youtube vids are available on the iphone (try search). Nothing I’ve uploaded at least - several of which are in the 10’s of thousands of views. I suspect only the top X% of videos are currently available and I slightly suspect that they are whitelisting manually. Also, Verizon has had a selection of youtube vids on VCAST for a while. Verizon has 50 million subscribers - why are they not a theoretical target? Please fact check, maybe I’m wrong.

@9 - you misspelled God. You forgot the capital “G”.

But to sue God, you would need to serve God. How can you serve God if you don’t have a body? St Thomas Aquinas stated that:

I answer that, It is absolutely true that God is not a body; and this can be shown in three ways.

First, because no body is in motion unless it be put in motion, as is evident from induction. Now it has been already proved (2, 3), that God is the First Mover, and is Himself unmoved. Therefore it is clear that God is not a body.

Secondly, because the first being must of necessity be in act, and in no way in potentiality. For although in any single thing that passes from potentiality to actuality, the potentiality is prior in time to the actuality; nevertheless, absolutely speaking, actuality is prior to potentiality; for whatever is in potentiality can be reduced into actuality only by some being in actuality. Now it has been already proved that God is the First Being. It is therefore impossible that in God there should be any potentiality. But every body is in potentiality because the continuous, as such, is divisible to infinity; it is therefore impossible that God should be a body.

Thirdly, because God is the most noble of beings. Now it is impossible for a body to be the most noble of beings; for a body must be either animate or inanimate; and an animate body is manifestly nobler than any inanimate body. But an animate body is not animate precisely as body; otherwise all bodies would be animate. Therefore its animation depends upon some other thing, as our body depends for its animation on the soul. Hence that by which a body becomes animated must be nobler than the body. Therefore it is impossible that God should be a body.

So CNET and others can’t sue God who obviously was involved in the creation of human beings and ultimately the iPhone.

It is going to be funny someday to look back 5, 10 or 15 years to this period, and laugh at how hard the RIAA and MPA and others (Metallica anyone) scrambled to try to protect thier old ways of thinking and their old ways of doing business. Their incredibly ANALOG models for success and wealth-amassing. They are out, and they know it, and they are just treading water.

The RIAA and MPA are like horseshoe-making blacksmiths in the early part of last century trying to drum up ways to sue Henry Ford and his contemporaries. “Um dudes, we don’t need you anymore, go away now, please. Kthxbye.” I don’t feel bad suggesting those people who work in that industry lose their jobs either, because frankly, I don’t think it was an honest day’s work to begin with. If it were an organization that at it’s core mission truly supported and cared about artists, that would be a different thing. But instead, they have been plundering artists. And even at times, manufacturing artists to then plunder. It’s a bogus model from its inception. I guess you could say that about a lot of businesses…

Change can foster incredible innovation, and when these fat cats do everything they can think of to keep things locked and frozen in the past with their hearts and minds super-glued to their bottom lines - their passion becomes something akin to holding a clove of garlic up to the future crying foul at each new dawn.

Come up with some new ideas to make yourself relavant again (debatable whether they were relavent to begin with…) and use your immense resources to innovate and invent and blow our minds with a new model that actually works for everyone. Get a clue please.

Apple’s protection can be certified in one queston:

Why doesn’t this person sue every person who embeds youtube video players in their pages as well, since this is the exact same thing.

I should probably learn how to spell relevant for my comment to be remotely considered so. oops!

BTW, today’s post from Seth Godin on copyright and lawsuits:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/s.....-the-.html

@ Ed, wow. I like God and that’s even a lot for me at 9 in the morning.

@Jose

“Apple and youtube have a business agreement, I would say that theoretically would make apple liable since they are not consuming content but distributing it as a partner”.

I agree. I wondered if Apple had thought about this before. It may not hold up in the courts but why take on the headache?

Apple may have liability because they are showing YouTube videos on the iPhone, but wouldn’t you need to PROVE that your video was shown on an iPhone and that Apple didn’t do anything to block it from being viewed on the iPhone?

I just find it hard to believe that you could prove that your video was shown on an iPhone unless you had an iPhone and viewed it yourself.

I’ve written quite a bit about secondary liability for IP infringement, which I think is a tool the courts are usually too reluctant to use.

But this one is preposterous!

” Duncan Riley

July 17th, 2007 at 2:27 am

The next logical step (by this reckoning) is to sue Mozilla and Microsoft for providing browsers that allow people to visit YouTube. A stupid idea from the land of the litigious lawyer.”

Wait, shouldn’t we be going after the estate of Thomas Edison, wasn’t it he that came up with the whole idea of transmitting electricity over power lines?? This has to be his fault!

/sarc

Ed

“@9 - you misspelled God. You forgot the capital “G”.”

My god understands my weaknesses, among them the feeling that with the whole omnipotent being thing, his ego isn’t so weak that he has to have his name capitalized.

Further, if you were to follow many practices, you don’t write the word at all, rather spell it like this: g-d. There mere act of writing his name is considered to trivialize his existence.

yeah such a lame - case theory here …

This again goes to show that the “YouTube” functionality of the iPhone is by far the weakest and most poorly thought out.

I mean, for god sakes, when are they going to UPDATE the ‘popular’ and ‘featured’ movies? It’s been 3 weeks now!

When are we going to get access to the other 99% of YouTube’s content?

I don’t understand. How could Apple be a target at all? It is merely serving as a gateway for YouTube’s content, much like any other computer capable of surfing the internet. Utilizing CNet’s logic, one would be able to sue any computer company shipping their computers out with web surfing software (IE, Firefox, Safari). Even taking things further, they would also be able to theoretically take legal action against anyone with a bookmark on his or her web browser specifically for YouTube. Just goes to show how crazy companies can get in trying to “protect” their content.

Crazy is definitely the word we were looking for. The frustrated companies can go to any extend to take other companies down . Simply insane!!!!!