When designing intellectual property laws, the struggle\ninherent in legislating is designing a law that will ensure that creators and\ninventors have adequate incentives to continue revealing new knowledge to the\npublic while also not overly limiting the public\u2019s ability to interact with\nprior works or express their own useful ideas. This balance has been especially\ndifficult in light of the popularization of the Internet, which as a medium\ninherently promotes and requires the rapid diffusion of knowledge between\nnumerous distant users. <\/p>\n\n\n
The unique problems of the Internet are especially troubling for copyright enforcement. In addition to direct infringers of copyrights being liable for infringement, third parties can also be liable for either contributory infringement<\/a> or vicarious infringement<\/a>. Contributory Infringement applies to \u201cone who with knowledge of the infringing activity, induces, causes or materially contributes to the infringing conduct of another.\u201d Vicarious liability, on the other hand, is based on the principle of respondeat superior and applies to those with a right or ability to control the infringing activities and a direct financial interest in such activities. It is not difficult to see the issues that these doctrines could pose for major websites like YouTube. YouTube hosts an extremely large amount<\/a> of user submitted content and directly benefits from this large amount of content. However, given how much content they have on their site, it is almost guaranteed that copyrighted material will be submitted in large numbers. <\/p>\n\n\n The unique problems of the Internet are especially troubling for copyright enforcement.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n In the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Congress included\nseveral \u201csafe harbors\u201d<\/a>\nto protect the operation of websites like YouTube that cannot possibly actively\nmanage all of their content. These safe harbors say that a \u201cservice provider\nwill not be held liable \u2026 for infringement of copyright by reason of the\nprovider\u2019s transmitting, routing, or providing connections for, material\nthrough a system or network controlled or operated by \u2026 the service provider\u201d\nunder certain conditions. One of these situations exempts the service provider\nin situations in which the content added by users is merely \u201chosted\u201d on the\nsite on behalf of subscribers. However, in situations in which YouTube gains\nspecific knowledge about infringing content, they can only maintain the benefit\nof this safe harbor if they \u201cact[] expeditiously to remove, or disable access\nto, the material.\u201d The Second Circuit dealt with this issue in relation to\nYouTube specifically in the case Viacom\nInternational, Inc. v. YouTube, Inc<\/a>., in which the court reinforced the\nidea that websites need not actively monitor all submitted content and can\nsimply put into place a system for notification of copyright infringement. <\/p>\n\n\n YouTube has two methods by which copyright owners can file a complaint against the use of copyrighted material in another\u2019s video. The first method is a \u201cContent ID Claim<\/a>.\u201d Content ID Claims do not result in disciplinary action against the user who uploaded the video, but can result in the video being taken down, muted, or even staying up but having its revenues shifted to the copyright owner. The second method is called a \u201cCopyright Strike<\/a>,\u201d commonly called a \u201ccopystrike\u201d for short. If one receives a copystrike, then the video is deleted. However, three copystrikes can result in \u201c[one\u2019s] account [being] subject to termination, all the video uploaded to the account [being] removed,\u201d and the inability to create a new channel. This is a weighty punishment in an age where many YouTubers make videos as their primary source of income<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n The issue with copystrikes recently came into the public\neye<\/a> when the Twitch streamer Alinity said that she was going to copystrike\nnotable YouTube celebrity Pewdiepie due to allegations of sexism in his videos,\ndespite the apparently obvious \u201cfair use\u201d nature of the use. Furthermore, other\nYouTube creators have received threats from extortionists<\/a>\nwho copystrike a video and only agree to withdraw the complaints if they are\npaid large amounts. <\/p>\n\n\n In the event of false claims, the DMCA says that creator of the allegedly infringing material cannot sue the service provider as long as the service provider followed certain steps involving how complaints are submitted, how notifications and counter notifications are delivered, and when the videos are deleted. However, it is possible for the creator to sue the party who submitted the false claim. In fact, YouTube creators Ethan and Hila Klein, operators of the channel h3h3productions, took a copyright holder named Matt Hoss to court in 2017<\/a> and won their case on the basis that the use of Hoss\u2019s content in the video in question constituted clear fair use. However, not all users have the time or financial resources needed to pursue these cases. This is especially true for small channel creators, who may not have an opportunity to grow if they fall victim to an extortionist or a vengeful copyright holder early in the history of their channel. <\/p>\n\n\n Furthermore, the courts would likely be overloaded if all such creators did actually pursue the issue in court. The DMCA perhaps does not give adequate weight to the public\u2019s interest in utilizing existing content to create new and transformative content of their own. Without changes designed to limit the ability for copyright claims to entirely eliminate a user\u2019s channel or changes designed to force the service provider to do their own investigation of fair use claims, the growth and potential of the Internet may continue to be limited by these sorts of abusive copyright claims in the future. <\/p>\n\n\n John Stathis, 25 March 2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When designing intellectual property laws, the struggle inherent in legislating is designing a law that will ensure that creators and inventors have adequate incentives to continue revealing new knowledge to the public while also not overly limiting the public\u2019s ability to interact with prior works or express their own useful ideas. This balance has been …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6206,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[51],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6205"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6205"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6837,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6205\/revisions\/6837"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}