What’s New with Wu

I moderated a panel at the American Society of Int’l Law yesterday, the key to which was no panel presentations allowed.  Just discussion and audience questions.

ASIL is a conference that tends to be about finding ways international law might be useful to the world.   Our panel — Esther Dyson, David Gross, and Michael Froomkin — seemed mainly to think that a relative lack of international regulation had been fine for internet development.  The interesting question is what happens next — my only guess so far has been a greater role for international trade.

But all this says something interesting.  If the Internet had been invented 50 years ago, there’d be an international agency tasked with its regulation or coordination, perhaps somewhat like ICAO.  That hasn’t happened (unless you count ICANN.)

I love the italian version of the book cover for “Who Controls the Internet” —

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.