The YouTube Defense (Off-Topic)

by RC , UK, Tuesday, August 05, 2014, 12:19 (3553 days ago) @ Mariachi
edited by RC, Tuesday, August 05, 2014, 12:29

Basically it's more or less:

"There is so much stuff on there we can't possibly police it. So we stick a line in the TOS that says 'you will not upload anything you don't have permission for" and then wilfully ignore everything our users upload. We will only ever do anything if the real rights holder, themselves (or legal representative) contact us and specifically list each offending item individually."

That's basically how ALL these 'user generated content' sites work.

EDIT: The individual posters don't have enough money to be worth going after (usually). And the sites only get sued if they get large enough (e.g. YouTube) and the suer (is that a word?) has enough content on there worth getting a settlement for (e.g. a record company, or big TV company).

Most rights holders can't be bothered with sending continual DMCA's (only applies in the US anyway), and the sites would whine that it'd be a burden to check the legitimacy of every upload, or to develop a system that'd do it semi-autonomously (like YouTube's ContentID).