This is a follow up to my post of earlier this week which covered YouTube's reasoning behind creating their new Copyright School. This post addresses the content of YouTube's lesson.
While the cartoon has some serious information in it, there seems to be a level of Simpson-esque social criticism that many may not take the message seriously. I reserved some level of judgment on the YouTube Copyright School idea but this is a farce. I guess you cannot expect much from a company whose popularity has been based on posting of videos without the copyright owner’s authority.
This Copyright School video seems to be a significant acknowledgement that YouTube is a platform for copyright infringement. (Don’t get me wrong there are postings to YouTube that do not infringe on copyrights; however, its previous success was based on infringing works. The successes and number of views and hits for “It’s Friday” would not have developed without users flocking to the site to see clips from “The Daily Show,” “The Colbert Report,” or numerous other unauthorized postings protected by copyright.).
While YouTube seems to be evolving, more and more often YouTube seems much more like Napster. Knowing that YouTube plays some type of active role in screening its videos makes it worse. A copyright school video like this makes you wonder if YouTube should not have to view the Napster and Grokster decisions and be schooled on contributory and vicarious copyright infringement too.
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