More evidence that copyright is a blunt instrument.
The internet is shaking things up in ways no one could have ever expected. Take the recent Google / Viacom battle. Google owns YouTube.com, and claims it is not culpable if anyone posts copyrighted material there. If the copyright owner asks for an infringing video to be removed from the YouTube website, Google will remove it. But this is very expensive for Viacom, to spend all day trying to find copyright infringements and so Viacom says Google must bear the responsibility of policing the YouTube website. Viacom has recently sued Google over this issue.
Can there be a compromise?
Perhaps not, and whoever wins, it will have a detrimental effect. In the New York Times of March 17, 2007, Joe Nocera writes that for either side...
Victory would be sweet, but losing could be disastrous. If Google wins, YouTube will never have to pay much to anyone for copyrighted content, and companies like Viacom will wind up either handing over their material or continuing to ask that it be removed — again and again and again. Smaller companies — not to mention the artists themselves — will probably have less control over their own work. If Viacom wins, YouTube will no longer be able to allow copyrighted content to be posted — which will surely hurt its business prospects. And it will make it more dangerous for any Internet site to use copyrighted material — even when it is legal to do so.
Copyright in the age of the internet is going to make the lawyers rich for decades to come.
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