What’s New with Wu

Philippe Gillieron writes an excellent response to my Slate YouTube article:

“In an article that was published on October 26 in Slate, Tim Wu, Professor at Columbia Law School and co-author of the interesting “Who Controls the Internet?”, argues that YouTube is likely to remain safe of any copyright liability as long as it complies with § 512 of the DMCA and its notice and take-down procedure.

This may well be true in the US. However, YouTube can by essence be reached in any country and one may easily argue that its audience is not limited to the US public; numerous videos related to Japanese or French music works (which primarily target these countries) are for instance available.”

Basically, Philippe is right — 512 doesn’t do YouTube any favors internationally. In fact, I have a vague sense of being hoist on my own petard, for this is a point we made repeatedly in “Who Controls the Internet?”

What YouTube may eventually have to do is begin to use Google’s very excellent geographic screening technology, and block users from reaching videos that cause it copyright problems overseas (at worse, it will have to block off whole countries if they are too litigous).

That isn’t death for YouTube, but it does suggest a limit on its profitability in markets without a safe-harbor.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 29th, 2006 at 8:54 pm and is filed under Copyright, International. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.