[85C Final] YouTube: Blurring Copyright Lines

Let's talk YouTube. What is YouTube?

It is a form of social networking wherein users interact with each other by commenting, sharing, or even just liking videos. These videos are sometimes home-made, and sometimes they are not. YouTube creates a space for both professionals and amateurs to upload their videos for the public to see. Within the span of one day, or even a couple of hours, YouTube produces new celebrities by hosting home-made videos -- like this one:

With the myriad genres and types of videos that are uploaded to YouTube, it has become easy to cross copyright laws and find ways around them. However, YouTube has also made it easier for companies to promote their products by coming into partnership with YouTube and YouTube giving them their own official channel. But as YouTube rapidly garners viewership and membership each day, one cannot necessarily claim that YouTube favors either the companies or the public. YouTube neither turns a blind eye to copyright infringements that take place on its site, but neither does it actively pursue copyright laws unless the rights holders provide it with some type of identification. YouTube, while it simultaneously entertains both sides of the spectrum, actually fosters a setting wherein copyright laws are blurred and compromises take place.

To understand how YouTube has developed, let us go back several years to when it was first started up. YouTube, like many other companies, was co-founded. Three former PayPal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, co-founded YouTube, with the intention of making it easier to search up videos that would otherwise be difficult to watch because they are not easily accessible to the public (USA Today). Who knew, however, that YouTube would become much more than just a hub of re-uploaded videos?

Just as quickly as YouTube exploded worldwide, Google bought the company in 2007, shelling out $1.65 billion -- at that time, the "most expensive purchase made by Google in its eight-year history," according to NBCNews. When Google bought YouTube, the video company was battling threats of copyright infringement suits. Not long after becoming Google's subsidiary, YouTube garnered companies to get in line to do business with them, a few of which were Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Entertainment, and Warner Music Group, Inc.

Obviously these music companies were not the only ones to recognize the value of YouTube, as viewership skyrocketed in the span of just one year.

Needless to say, as viewers increased, so did the possibility and frequency of copyright infringement, to which YouTube responded with the content ID feature. The introduction of content ID favors the entertainment industry as YouTube makes an effort to track copyright infringement on behalf of the rights holders, provided that the rights holders "deliver YouTube reference files of content they own, metadata describing that content, and policies on what they want YouTube to do when we find a match".

Even with content ID, upholding copyright laws still pales in comparison to the frequency of copyright infringements that take place on YouTube's web grounds.

In Lucas Hilderbrand's essay, Youtube: Where Cultural Memory and Copyright Converge, he argues that most copyright holders find YouTube to be dangerous waters, and request to have YouTube disable streaming videos to which these holders own the rights, not necessarily for the sake of competition but for the sake of "maintaining some kind of control over what is publicly accessible and how it is distributed." This begs the question of how copies of videos uploaded to YouTube are controlled. Although content ID exists as a feature YouTube offers to appease the music industry, copyright holders still only hold limited power as there are possibilities of copies of the music/videos are manipulated to have no easily detectable similarity to the original artwork. Copyright laws are already murky as they are, as Sheldon W. Halpern argues in his essay, Copyright Law.

"... the determination of what, in any given work, is "expression" and what is "idea" is an extraordinarily subtle and complex task, in which the standards and criteria exist only at the highest analytical level. ... Where a taking involves the nonliteral elements of a work, the line between evocation or use of ideas and copying of protected expression is by no means clear."

It is impossible to completely observe copyright laws on YouTube as YouTube is merely the vehicle to accessing "culturally significant texts that would otherwise be elusive" (Hilderbrand). Thus, the definition of copyright infringement is blurred as copyright infringement is allowed, either given certain circumstances, or for as long as YouTube does not detect the infringement. This then begs the question of who has the power over these copyrighted videos.

While YouTube provides copyright holders means to retain their copyrighted products and identify copies of such products, there are still millions of copyright infringed products that are not as easily recognizable and still illegally accessible to the public in other ways. Technology is just evolving too quickly, that although "copyright owner[s] attempt to find a way physically to prevent copying of the work, [they are] confronted with further advances in technology designed to defeat the protection scheme" (Halpern).

But YouTube cannot be blamed. Unbeknownst to it because of the millions of users that access YouTube each day, YouTube promotes both legal uses of copyrighted material, while also hosting videos that provide loopholes to avoiding copyright strikes while still using copyrighted material illegally.

Although YouTube is trying to remain neutral by allowing its space to be one of free expression, but at the same time, protecting the media industry via copyrights, YouTube has made it hard for individual consumers to be confronted with copyright infringement because of the amount of users YouTube welcomes.

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Works Cited

Associated Press. "Google Buys YouTube for $1.65 Billion." MSNBC.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 6 June 2013.

Halpern, Sheldon W. "Copyright Law and the Challenge of Digital Technology." Image Ethics in the Digital Age. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2003. 143-70. Print.

Hilderbrand, Lucas. "Youtube: Where Cultural Memory and Copyright Converge." Film Quarterly 61.1 (2007): 48-57. Print.

Hopkins, Jim. "Surprise! There's a Third YouTube Co-founder." USAToday.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 6 June 2013.