Google YouTube a legal minefield or a revolution?

Stan Beer
Friday, 10 November 2006 17:56

Opinion and Analysis

Google has released an ominous warning in its latest filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, saying that the planned acquisition of YouTube for US$1.65 billion worth of Google stock could involve damages awards and a forced change of the company's businesses practices. Market watchers had warned prior to acquisition last month that video posting site was a legal minefield waiting to explode. Are we seeing that or the start of a information revolution.

YouTube works on the rather tenuous basis that it will pretty much allow any material to be posted to the site regardless of copyright restrictions. However, it will remove material if it receives a valid complaint froma copyright holder.

Last month YouTube removed 30,000 videos from the site after a complaint from the Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers, and Publishers. However, there are still millions of videos on the site, many of which are in clear breach of copyright laws

Having had a look at what can be found on Google for instance, if you happen to live in Australia or Western Europe, you can find entire episodes and series of popular TV shows, such as Lost and Jericho, which have yet to be shown outside the US. YouTube visitors can literally watch commercial free TV shows on their PC screen before they're even released in their market.

There is supposed to be a 10 minute restriction on video postings but every now and then a poster seems to be able to find their way around the restriction and post an entire 40 minute episode of a TV show, which is inevitably removed after it has been discovered. However, not before many thousands of viewers have managed to see the bootlegged video.

Google has been nothing short of a pioneer in freeing up the flow of information and getting it out of the hands of the elite and into the hands of the ordinary people. The project to put the world's libraries online, aggregating the world's news services, being the first to give away 1GB of storage for email, allowing users to search for images as easily as they search for text, bringing the world to us all through the amazing Google Earth and having a host of really cool beta apps in the Google Labs have all changed the way we access information.

However, it is becoming increasingly clear that a battle royale is brewing between the former custodians of information and the new paradigm of information freedom which has been spearheaded by Google. One of the former elite, News Corporation, has acquiesced with the old paradigm through the use of technology to filter out copyright infringers from its MySpace social networking site using technology.

Google has so far not followed the example of News Corp. To do so, would seem to fly in the face of everything Google stands for. The next few months promise to be very interesting indeed.