Found via IWantMedia, this GoogleWatch piece on Mark Cuban, ever the critic of YouTube, poking that company in the eye by demanding it turn over the names of users who posted IP from his independent studio, Magnolia Pictures. Oh, the irony.
Cuban Puts Lawyers Where His Mouth Is
Found via IWantMedia, this GoogleWatch piece on Mark Cuban, ever the critic of YouTube, poking that company in the eye by demanding it turn over the names of users who posted IP from his independent studio, Magnolia Pictures. Oh, the irony….
He can fit a lot of lawyers in there.
he’s not going after YouTube – he’s going after regular joes. and methinks joe is not not gonna be happy. cuban has been seen as a little guy – sticking up for the underdog by the very nature of his confrontational relationship with the powers that be. now, he’s throwing that down the youtube.
Dr. Pete: “he’s going after regular joes”
I don’t think that he is after the little guys. He is pretty clear in his post that he is trying to understand the motivation of people who post pirated content. You are absolutely correct suggesting that there is no mileage in chasing the little guys. He’s a smart guy and knows this.
It’s also fairly obvious that he is using this to keep up the pressure on YouTube to start filtering content actively – which by the look of things is already starting to happen.
The irony? What irony? Irony would be if Cuban had been complaining about copyrights and that Google should ignore copyrighted material. Quite the contrary. Mark Cuban may be annoying, but he’s been remarkably consistent as far as GooTube is concerned. Given that Cuban has long said that YouTube will have ongoing problems with copyrighted videos, it’s only natural that when his company is affected that he would take the very steps that he predicted others would do.
Perhaps my lack of access to an OED has harmed my vocabulary and there’s a meaning of “irony” that I have missed.
He’s attempting to make the case that YouTube encourages copyright theft. He’s making a compelling case that YouTube is very similar to Napster 1.0 and should not be protected by the DMCA Safe Harbor protections. This will be an interesting battle and IMO if GOOG cannot get distribution deals done with big media companies this may very well be a big problem for YouTube.
Its clear to me that YouTube’s policies all along were set up to get maximum benefit from copyright protected video.
And re: Christopher, I didn’t understand the irony comment either.
I’m not sure I agree with the Napster/YouTube comparison. Yes, YouTube was happy to look the other way when it suited them, but they’ve always housed the videos and have operated semi-transparently. Napster was a file-sharing network based on hacker/Warez technology; it’s entire architecture was created not only to distribute copyrighted files but to run that distribution on other people’s machines, milking them for resources and masking the trail of the file-sharing. In terms of video distribution, BitTorrent is probably a more appropriate comparison to Napster.