YouTube Finds Signing Rights Deals Frustrating

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "YouTube executives are finding it a slog to get all of the necessary permissions to license the songs and shows users are putting on the popular site, the Wall Street Journal reports. 'YouTube or its partners must locate parties ranging from studios to actors, and from music composers to the owners of venues, and get them to sign off. Where they don't succeed, YouTube risks being hit with lawsuits or having to take popular content down. "It's such a mess because the [entertainment companies] have all of these valuable assets that are just locked up with so many people who need to sign off on them," says YouTube Chief Executive Chad Hurley. "I don't know what it requires, if the government needs to be involved," Mr. Hurley laughs. "I don't know."'"

And on the other end of the spectrum...

[TopShelf]

At least you have some entities getting out ahead of this [nhl.com] and cooperating with YouTube/Google Video to get their content out there, like the NHL [google.com]. They're including current games, as well as selected "classics" from previous ones. They're even interested in incorporating user-generated content into the mix...

Re:Google bites the dust on this one

[mav[LAG]]

Google is not run by fools. By inheriting YouTube's (fairly minor) legal hassles, they - and not someone else - get to decide what battles to fight and what to settle. Google has already done this with the library and book projects - picking and choosing their fights so that they get to determine what legal precedent is set. Some fights they won, some they lost but it was a lot better than sitting on the sidelines watching someone else being sued.

Video is going to make Google an absolute fortune in five years time. The last thing they wanted is someone with shallower pockets determining the legal landscape for them. The technology is not yet "commoditized and trivial" enough. But it won't take long and when it is, the legal and business environment will have been determined by Google itself and no-one else.

Re:Government?

[Haeleth]

You should think of the other side as well.
An amusing clip made an amateur piecing together work done by professionals with lots of skill who devoted a lot of time in making the work is more valueable than the work of the professionals?

Who said it was more valuable? The point is not that it is priceless, but rather that it is not worthless.

It is a creative activity, and the purpose of copyright law is to promote creative activities, not to protect the jobs of professionals. We must encourage creativity from everyone, even those who turn out not to be very good at it; universal participation is the only way to guarantee that the talented will discover their abilities in time to contribute to society. If copyright law has evolved into something that is more concerned with protecting existing works than with incentivising new works -- if it has evolved into something that is stifling any form of creative expression, no matter how trivial or pointless you may think that form -- then it is broken, and should be fixed.

Besides, your "amateur piecing together work done by professionals" may be another person's "subversive genius deconstructing modern culture". Consider Duchamp's Fountain, one of the most significant sculptures of the 20th century; to a connoiseur of ceramics, no doubt it's just an amateur rotating a urinal that was manufactured by professionals with lots of skill who devoted a lot of time to developing that urinal, but for some reason more people remember the guy who rotated it than the guy who actually designed it...

The question is how do we know relaxing copyright would do harm than good?

Assuming you intended to ask "how do we know whether it would do more harm or more good", the answer is that we don't know, but we can make a fairly shrewd guess by looking at history. From history, we see that lax copyright has rarely prevented creative geniuses from producing amazing works of art.

For example, Shakespeare's works were constantly copied, with poor-quality pirate editions often hitting the streets before his authorized publishers had finished setting their type. This did not prevent him from writing more plays. On the contrary, it created a situation where he had to keep writing more plays to earn a living! If Shakespeare lived today, he could just write Hamlet and then retire, secure in the knowledge that he, his children, and even his grandchildren would have a secure source of income from the royalties. He wouldn't have any pressing financial reason to write e.g. King Lear. Perhaps he'd write it anyway; perhaps he wouldn't. People are motivated by things other than money. The point is that copyright law deals primarily with money, and modern copyright law would reduce, rather than increase, the financial incentive for a modern Shakespeare to continue to produce plays.

Can you think of any counter-examples? Are there any geniuses we can identify who only produced great works of art because they would be protected by copyright, or geniuses who refused to produce great works of art because they considered copyright protections inadequate?