Hurley's World

YouTube has been drawing a lot of heat due to its questionable copyright stance. With a user-uploaded content base, it’s pretty much unavoidable that they will have copyright issues. It’s arguable whether or not YouTube’s financial success hinges on this — on the one hand, the copyrighted content is one of YouTube’s biggest draws, and it couldn’t have established such a user base without it; on the other, YouTube is a fantastic place to find original user-generated content. Also, as sites struggle with traffic in their video hosting, it’s nice to have YouTube as a mirror to supplement that load.The latest in the debacle is a lawsuit from Robert Tur, over the upload of the video of Reginald Denny getting beaten during the LA riots in 1992. This lawsuit is asinine, and I’ll tell you why.The lawsuit notes that the video in question has been viewed over 1,000 times. Here’s the asinine part: “Tur is asking the court for $150,000 per violation and an injunction barring any further use of his material.” The injunction is fine. Asking for $150,000 per violation is ridiculous. So, for someone uploading a video, and 1,000 people watching it, Tur expects $150,000,000? Let’s look at the comparative revenue lost. Let’s say Tur had produced a DVD for release of this clip. The clip itself is pretty short, so it’d be a pretty empty DVD, but let’s say he filled it out with extras such as interviews with the cameraman. Let’s also say that somehow, he gets DVDs produced for free. Most DVDs come in at under $20 (some way cheaper), but let’s say he sells it for $20. (That’d be way better than the measly $10 he might pull from theatre showings, provided the theatres gave him all the proceeds and kept nothing.) Let’s also presume, as unlikely as it is, that all 1,000 people who watched the clip were absolutely going to buy it, but after watching the clip, suddenly were not due to the fact that watching a grainy low resolution YouTube clip was all they needed to sate their appetite. Total lost revenue in this best case scenario: $20 x 1,000 incidents = $20,000. What justifies this 7,500x increase to $150,000,000? Let’s say YouTube’s advertising was absolutely fantastic and able to do the impossible, generating a whopping $1 for every user that came to their page. Gross lost profit plus earned advertising revenue = $21,000. Still just a bit short of that $150 million mark. It’s not even like Tur is losing syndicated revenue from use of the clip in more traditional means — no documentary or news show is going to go to YouTube, download the video, and show it to circumvent Tur. In fact, any producer worth his or her salt would be extremely leary of using anything on YouTube, without making damned sure that the ownership of the clip was well worked out.YouTube seems to understand copyright law pretty well, so they will most likely come out in the clear. YouTube staff didn’t upload the clip; end users did. In that sense, they might be classified as a common carrier. Internet newsgroups went through this debacle years ago, so it’s not like this is new. I am not a lawyer, but I believe that the most YouTube has to do is provide a means to report copyrighted content, and take it down if requested. They have done so. But Tur didn’t even ask YouTube to take down the work — he went straight to suing. In that sense, I side with YouTube on this.Whether or not YouTube is right is arguable: one could successfully argue that a significant amount of their revenue comes from copyrighted material. One could also argue that it’s users, not YouTube, who are behaving badly. One could even argue that YouTube should monitor all content that gets posted. (That last one is a bit implausible, however: given the number of users, the number of posts, and the difficulty of recognizing copyrighted content without false positives and false negatives, it’s just unlikely that it could be done well.) Suing them over it is probably not going to get a huge result. Unless laws change, they appear to be in good standing. This isn’t a lawsuit about copyright infringement: it’s a lawsuit about seeing dollar signs. After all, with a $150,000,000 lawsuit, would you consider settling for, oh, I don’t know, $500,000? Possibly. However, if YouTube is smart, they won’t. Or every content producer is going to come after YouTube with their hand held out, asking for their cut. YouTube has great word-of-mouth power: as a content producer, you should be leveraging that for greater reach, not killing it! If I see a low-res clip on YouTube and like it, then I may buy the DVD. Even NBC has come around to this point of view. Tur should take note, because we’re all anxiously awaiting his DVD.