A decade ago, a young entrepreneur got a ton of traffic selling something he didn’t own.
Before you could say "but he didn’t have the rights" he sold that site, Broadcast.Com, to Yahoo for over $6 billion in stock. Then he sold the stock after the Internet bubble doubled its value to over $13 billion.
The entrepreneur’s name? Mark Cuban.
Well, Cuban’s grown up now. He sees YouTube getting a ton of traffic, much of it from perfectly legitimate sources, and says it’s worthless. "The only reason it hasn’t been sued yet is because there is nobody with big money to sue," he told Reuters.
UPDATE: Apparently his undies are in a twist because Yahoo may wind up paying about one-quarter what his fake company got for YouTube.
Want to know what’s even funnier?
Under the present copyright regime, anyone using content, even tangentially, can be sued to oblivion. Not just YouTube, but all of YouTube’s users.
And all that creativity goes away.
The fact is that most of the raw material used in new creative products comes from old creative products. And the present U.S. copyright regime denies this reality. It places a veto not only on new creative work, but on technology as well.
And that’s just wrong.
Why isn’t the U.S. tech economy growing? Why is our creative economy no longer extending its lead against the rest of the world, but falling back?
It’s copyright absolutism. It’s copyright law that is so deeply flawed it makes illegal the very things it was designed to encourage.
The only purpose of copyright law — or of patent law — is to encourage the creation of more intellectual goods.
Our law has, for nearly a decade, done just the opposite. And, not coincidentally, we have been falling behind ever since that happened.
Let’s get back to fair use. Let’s get back to copyrights which expire. Let’s only allow new inventions to be patented — not math, not ways of doing business. And let’s have enough patent people in place at the Patent Office so you can’t sneak crap past them.
Reform now. Legalize Mark Cuban.
All you guys talking about YouTube’s supposed legal exposure need to read the DMCA. They are safe as long as they respond to notifications in a timely manner and ask for a sworn statement of ownership from the poster. If they don’t get that and they take the video down, they are safe. If they do get that, they are safe until a court decision tells them to take it down, even if the sworn statement is a patent lie on the face of it. They do not have to pre-screen content. They do not have to ban users who repeately submit content they do not own (although some sites do that as part of their ToS). They do not have to filter for trademarks and suspicious words.
Read the DMCA: It was a huge loss to rights holders.
The only way YouTube could be liable is if attorneys start to get creative and go beyond copyright to approaches like civil conspiracy or civil RICO actions.
I am coming at this from the perspective of a rights holder who wasting five percent of his time dealing with infringements. If you pundits have any great insights as to how we can “sue the butts off” these guys, please let me and my attorneys know. Otherwise, don’t blog about something you know nothing about.
All you guys talking about YouTube’s supposed legal exposure need to read the DMCA. They are safe as long as they respond to notifications in a timely manner and ask for a sworn statement of ownership from the poster. If they don’t get that and they take the video down, they are safe. If they do get that, they are safe until a court decision tells them to take it down, even if the sworn statement is a patent lie on the face of it. They do not have to pre-screen content. They do not have to ban users who repeately submit content they do not own (although some sites do that as part of their ToS). They do not have to filter for trademarks and suspicious words.
Read the DMCA: It was a huge loss to rights holders.
The only way YouTube could be liable is if attorneys start to get creative and go beyond copyright to approaches like civil conspiracy or civil RICO actions.
I am coming at this from the perspective of a rights holder who wasting five percent of his time dealing with infringements. If you pundits have any great insights as to how we can “sue the butts off” these guys, please let me and my attorneys know. Otherwise, don’t blog about something you know nothing about.