Copyright craziness

In case you haven't heard, Viacom is suing YouTube for allowing users to upload copyrighted video clips of TV shows and movies. Recently, Viacom requested that Google (the owner of YouTube) turn over logs showing which video clips users view.

Privacy advocates are understandably concerned about this. Viacom claims they are not requesting any personally identifiable information, but they're asking for records that show people's usernames and IP addresses, and which videos each person has viewed. With most Internet service providers, each computer has a unique IP address. Plus, many people are bound to have told friends and acquaintances what their YouTube usernames are. Even though it would probably be only Viacom, not the general public, who sees the records, it still sounds awfully personally identifiable to me.

In addition to the privacy issues, this case really demonstrates, at least to me, that copyright laws need to change. According to U.S. copyright law, it is virtually forbidden to use pictures of celebrities, clips from movies, or audio files of songs on a website unless you took the pictures, made the movie, or wrote the song yourself. This means that if you have a site dedicated to your favorite celebrity, you probably won't be able to have any pictures of that celebrity on your site! Home videos cannot even use a popular song as background music. Making music videos by blending clips of a favorite actor or movie with a song, as many people do on YouTube, is legally out of the question.

The Internet would truly be a worse place if these laws were consistently enforced. For many people, copyrighted clips are by far the most useful content on YouTube. I don't enjoy watching other people's home movies, so there are only about 2 or 3 videos I enjoy on YouTube that don't violate copyright law. An exception to this is the growing number of news outlets and musical artists creating their own YouTube accounts, where they display news clips and music videos perfectly legally because they own the content. This is a great trend that has resulted in lots of legal and valuable videos being uploaded to YouTube. However, not all copyright holders have YouTube accounts. People have a right to access news and informational videos, and regular people should be allowed to upload these videos if TV stations fail to. Similarly, people who make fan sites dedicated to a particular actor, actress, or singer should be legally able to display image galleries and movie clips related to their favorite celebrity. Fan sites are a great source of information, and people should not have to rely on a celebrity's official site, if one even exists, as their sole source.

The purpose of copyright law when it was written into the Constitution in 1776 was to encourage progress in science and art by ensuring that creators would be able to profit from their works. Today, however, copyright law bans many activities that do not affect anyone's profits. Yes, uploading a whole movie to YouTube might diminish the movie studio's profits, but displaying a few short clips is likely to make more people go see the movie, if anything. Additionally, a YouTube user was recently banned for uploading clips of the Neil Entwistle trial, which aired on TruTV. But when I go to TruTV's website, I don't see any way to purchase DVDs or tapes of the trial footage. If they were selling such a thing, I would probably be interested in buying it, but because they're not, the YouTube user isn't depriving them of any revenue by making it available for free.

Copyright law should achieve its purpose of encouraging artistic and scientific achievement. Right now, however, it is depriving the public of valuable pictures, videos, and information, as well as stifling creativity by restricting people from building on others' works. Copyright law needs to be fair to regular people instead of giving large companies all the power as it does now.

On an unrelated note, check out this great editorial published in the Herald by Randy S. Chapman, president of the Mass. Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys: "To demonize a defense attorney is unjust."