YouTube's Lawyers A Little Too Trigger Happy; Could Come Back To Bite Them
from the you-did-what-now? dept
Plenty of attention today on the fact that YouTube's lawyers decided to shoot off a cease and desist letter to Mike Arrington at Techcrunch, for putting up an easy to use tool that would let users download videos from YouTube and put them on their video iPods. Arrington (a former lawyer from the very firm that sent the C&D) goes through why he doesn't believe it's valid, noting that the site's own terms of service clearly say it's okay to download videos for personal use, so long as you retain the copyright info associated with the video. He also points out that anyone who uploads a video agrees to YouTube's terms, which includes granting all YouTube users "a non-exclusive license to access your User Submissions through the Website, and to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display and perform such User Submissions..." However, when you read the full cease-and-desist letter it gets even more interesting. First, YouTube's lawyers pull out the Grokster "inducement" standard, in claiming that the tool "induces" people to infringe on YouTube's user's copyrights. It makes sense, because that's about the only argument they'd have against the tool, since the tool (or its developer) aren't actually guilty of direct copyright infringement. However, that's extremely dangerous territory for YouTube to get into, because there are plenty (Hi, Mark Cuban), who believe that YouTube itself is guilty of "inducing" copyright infringement itself. The decision by YouTube's lawyers to stretch the definition of "inducement" could very well come back to bite them -- especially if whoever sues them points out that the company's own lawyers seem to have a very broad definition of the term themselves. Second, YouTube keeps wanting to claim a clear separation between themselves and the actual copyright of the videos that are being uploaded for very sound legal reasons. Yet, here, they're suddenly sending their lawyers out, not to protect their own copyright, but the copyright of the uploaded videos. That seems to be suggesting that they really do have a closer connection to the legal status of the videos than they'd like to claim to remain untouched by the legal liability.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Just a mistake
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Although on the flipside, wouldn't they welcome a reduced bandwidth bill?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Me not get
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Its in the numbers people
This is purely the motive for making money on the whole site so lets not got into this too deep its all about the numbers.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
@Anthony
I can clearly see a situation in which YouTube is permitted to act autonomously in regards to legal issues, that doesn't involve Google. And I agree with Mike, this is just a stupid, stupid move by whomever is behind it.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]