Over the past couple of weeks YouTube sensations/stars have been struggling to keep their accounts protected. They want YouTube to change their rules on copyright. “The whole copyright system for online video is broken, allowing for obvious copyright infringement in some places, and punishing innocent people in others. Fixing it will require regulation to restore the protection of creativity.”
People have to understand that copyright is regulation. “It’s a government-created monopoly enforced through legal coercion. With copyright there is no underlying physical object to protect — the policy is about restricting the right of others to make copies, not the right of access to scarce resources. As such, there is a trade-off between enriching the common cultural heritage — the public domain — and allowing authors to profit from their work.”
YouTube, is largest video hosting site on the internet, where thousands of people have made careers and changed their lives by posting their videos. The major problem is "fair use." This is the part of U.S. law holding that people can legally copy portions of works verbatim under certain circumstances, such as critique, parody, commentary, reporting, or education.
A giant portion of YouTube's videos are fair use, protected even under the highly flawed Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which provides a legal basis for copyright holders to issue takedown notices of infringing content. Most seriously, they can file official legal papers to YouTube, which puts a copyright "strike" on the account. Three strikes, and the entire account is permanently deleted.
So on the one hand, the law of fair use is being flagrantly ground into dirt, and on the other, the biggest social media company in the world is bootstrapping a video service with blatantly ripped-off content. Online copyright needs new regulation from Congress. The existing legal framework is clearly failing to function as designed, and the profit motive is shockingly not pushing corporations to abide by existing law.
http://theweek.com/articles/608700/copyright-laws-are-breaking-youtube-heres-how-fix-problem
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