Music Rights Holders Sue YouTube Again

bennyboy64 writes "NewTeeVee reports on a criminal investigation that has been launched against senior executives of YouTube and parent company Google in Hamburg, Germany over allegations of copyright infringement. The case started after a complaint was filed by German music rights holders. Hamburg's prosecutor has formally requested assistance from US colleagues to compel YouTube to produce log files identifying who uploaded as well as who viewed 500 specific videos."

Well, nothing new here...

[RobertM1968]

Looks like business as usual. Guess they will keep trying until (a) they can no longer afford to or (b) they set a precedent by actually having such a case go through the courts and win.

Nothing beats a failure like failing again!

Because you copy the work into RAM

[tepples]

Can somebody please explain to me why it is apparently illegal to simply receive or observe a performance that violates a copyright? I was of the impression that only the distributing party would be liable.

Because you copy the work into your computer's RAM to view it. There is an exception in countries' copyright laws covering necessary short-term copies, such as 17 USC 117 and foreign counterparts, but a lot of these exceptions cover copies only from those copies that are lawfully made.

Crazy

[Mechanist.tm]

Logs to get who viewed the videos. Is that not crazy?

Re:They have no business in knowing who viewed the

[Tanuki64]

Whether or not you can be held responsible for viewing the videos does not matter. For all non-Germans who might not know: This is the court in Hamburg. When it comes to copyright and internet you cannot find a more stupid court with more imbecile or corrupt judges than the one in Hamburg. You have enough money? You can get any ruling you like. Usually it does not hold before a higher court, but this is not necessarily expected by the "plaintiffs". The main task for the court in Hamburg is to be used to threaten and intimidate the monetary weaker party. In this case Google is not the monetary weaker party, but at least there is a chance that the "plaintiff" gets the data who watched the videos. It is very unlikely they will be sued directly. Though before the court in Hamburg this might be successful. It is most likely that the people who watched the videos get some sort of 'cease and desist letter', which costs them several hundred dollar. In Germany this is a legal way blackmailing people to pay in order not to get sued. In this case, if they do not pay probably nothing will happen. The legal base is just too weak. But enough will pay out of fear to get sued so that this scam will pay off nicely.

Price != Value

[jonaskoelker]

As the supply becomes infinite, what happens to the price? As people have the ability to copy and now distribute data, text, music and movies at virtually zero cost, why is this data worth anything anymore?

I disagree with your terminology here. Not your argument or conclusion (I have yet to take a stand on those), but your terminology.

(maybe that makes me a pedantic, but so be it. If the mods don't like this, oh well; I have karma to burn and I'm willing to have it be burned to say what I want to say.)

Value and price are two differen things. Value is, roughly speaking, how much we like having something and/or how badly we want it. Price is the amount of resources we trade away to get it.

I value much of the software I run. I value listening to JT Bruce's "A skeptic's Hypothesis". I value watching "Big Buck Bunny". But I pay aprice of 0 for all of these. (There's a transaction cost toall of these, sure, but no price).

What will happen to the value as supply rises? Pretty much nothing. The price will likely drop to zero. Also, people might get a closer approximation of their real preferences if there is more competition.

But they'll still like listening to $BAND just as much.

(someone used to call this "value in trade" versus "value in use"; I think it was a greek, but you're armed with the power of Google, so use it if you need.)

Re:Performance != Observance

[icebraining]

This breakdown of the cost of a typical major-label release by the independent market-research firm Almighty Institute of Music Retail shows where the money goes for a new album with a list price of $15.99.

$0.17 Musicians' unions
$0.80 Packaging/manufacturing
$0.82 Publishing royalties
$0.80 Retail profit
$0.90 Distribution
$1.60 Artists' royalties
$1.70 Label profit
$2.40 Marketing/promotion
$2.91 Label overhead
$3.89 Retail overhead
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/6558540/walmart_wants_10_cds [rollingstone.com]

When the label _profits_ are greater than the artist royalties, and when online retailers want to charge me almost the same as if they were selling me a CD, the moral urge to buy music is weak.

Re:They have no business in knowing who viewed the

[Yvan256]

They often have little or NOTHING to do with the video content.

Not to mention that YouTube always takes the middle of the video for the thumbnail. Some uploaders are abusing that to post completely unrelated videos with the middle few seconds being what they want the thumbnail to be.

YouTube should make the thumbnails from random places so that uploaders can't fake them so easily.

Re:Performance != Observance

[Daengbo]

Calm down. I'm prety sure he's talking about the long history of copyright law [wikipedia.org]:

• Crown-authorized copyright given to printers, c. 1500-1700
• Modern copyright law, giving the rights to the authors, not the publishers, c. 1700- 1975
• Work for hire was later codified and artists' contracts typically had a WFH clause, 1976 - pres.

I'm surprised you didn't immediately identify what he was talking about, since you seem to have spent a lot of time thinking about this subject of copyrights and have strong thoughts on it.

Re:Hamburg = Texas

[Jesus_666]

It's not exactly +1, Funny; +1, Informative applies better. The Landgericht Hamburg is known for their peculiar opinions. For example, they maintain that someone running a website involving user content (like a forum or anything with a comment function) is liable for everything anyone writes on that website. And I'm not just talking about thinfs like hate speech, I'm talking about "a company sues the webmaster because a random user falsely said they have been sued in the past".

Oh, and if you delete the post and sign an agreement stating that you won't say that ever again (even though you never said it in the first place)? The user just needs to come back and repost his allegiation and you're getting a fine (historically in the five digits).

The real kicker? The law says that you're responsible for user-generated content on your website only if it's technologically feasible and reasonable to monitor the content. However, the LG Hamburg is of the opinion that it's always reasonable to thoroughly monitor all content, even if your forum generates 200.000 posts a month - as in the "Heise verdict", which has luckily been revised in the next instance so that you only need to remove posts you know contain illegal content. Yes, the LG Hamburg maintained that you're supposed to know for every single post made on your site whether its content is legal or not.


It's no surprise at all that Hamburg is the venue of choice to sue YouTube and possibly its users over videos infringing on someone's copyrights. I'm positive that the LG Hamburg will come to the conclusion that every user can be expected to be fully aware of the licensing status of all background music in random videos. Before they even watch the video and know which song(s) it contains.