ravensheart18 said:
EzraPound said:
ravensheart18 said:
No, there is no reason for them to be exempt.
A company/individual has the right to control their own intellectual property. If they want to release them on Youtube, on the radio, or any other method they choose that THEIR choice, not YOUR choice.
Oh, and its not hard to take a copy of any song/video on youtube.
Kind of missed the point, here--that YouTube doesn't involve the
possession of media, therefore the piracy argument is even more tenuous than it would be with downloads (which is enough of a minefield, anyway). Also, where does your logic end? If users sharing videos with each other on YouTube is "releasing", then is someone playing an album for someone else doing the same? Presumably you're predicating your argument on some standard of reproduction.
You don't have to copy it to breach copyright. For example, on most music/DVDs, showing them in public is a copyright violation unless you have a seperate license to do that. That is in effect what you are doing on youtube.
Also, ever heard of something called Fair Use? These details get trampled underfoot by the corporate brainwash campaign, which you've obviously bought into:
"Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use."
Well first off thats only the legislation in one country, which by the way is one of the complicaitons in dealing with broadcasting on youtube. My understanding of the case law around this in both Canada and the US is that "fair use" does not include public display of the entire document. Heck, even full copying for educational purposes is not permitted. That provision was meant for you to take snipits (which youtube does allow).
Personally, I don't think full allowance of YouTube publication would make much of a difference
Well actually since illegal file sharing came it it has proven to make a difference. Sales are a tiny fraction of what they were in the 80s or 90s.
Besides, its not your property, you don't get to decide.
1) Fair use is determined on a case-by-case basis. If I showed a movie I purchased to a few of my friends, for example (i.e., "in public"), it would fall under fair use. In terms of showing one to a larger audiences, the entirety of the situation would be considered, with importance being allotted to factors such as whether I'm profiting from it, the size of the audience, the context of the showing ("entertainment" is viewed differently from "education"), etc. In one instance, in Canada, a cottage resort was taken to court for showing full films for free to its occupants--but the case was dismissed as superfluous.
Obviously, the fact YouTube 1) does not provide hard copies, 2) does not involve financial transactions between individual users, and 3) is a user-based, "sharing" system all complicate the production of any kind of verdict on whether it falls under fair use. As a result of this, the legal status of copyrighted material on YouTube varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
2) There's some truth to your comment about reproducing complete works in public; however, whether you'd even define much of what's on YouTube as a "complete work" is debatable. As I mentioned before, in Canada, for example, one result of the CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada verdict (which allowed for the unrestricted photocopying of content from books for personal) was that a judge subsequently declared the downloading of music legal, as he saw downloading an .mp3 as no different than obtaining the section of a book from a library photocopier (this distinction relies on the notion of an "album" as a complete work).
Uploading was another matter--it's flimsy territory, though largely illegal in Canada--but the RCMP has made explicit statements that they're not intending to pursue non-profit uploaders, and private lawsuits attempted by the CRIA floundered on the grounds that they weren't considered strong enough to warrant the violating of defendants' privacy. So in Canada, anyway--when it comes to non-profit sharing--all instances of it are either legal, or simply cannot be taken action against.
3) But YouTube isn't "file-sharing" in the explicit sense, because you do not actually
receive a hard copy of a file. My point wasn't that file-sharing hasn't damaged the profitability of the "record biz"--obviously it has, to the benefit of unaffiliated artists who now have greater exposure everywhere--but that YouTube in particular does not fully supplant the utility of, say, a purchased CD or DVD.
And actually, given that I was part of a voter bloc that installed governments in Canada that have chosen to either legalize or not enforce against file-sharing,
I do get to decide!
