YouTube's Broadcasting Ourselves blog announced a few changes in their 14 April 2011 post, YouTube Copyright Education (remixed). They have a new copyright tutorial and help center. And, if YouTube receives a copyright notification for one of your videos, you will have to attend YouTube Copyright School if you want to be able to upload anything to YouTube again.
SLA HQ's Doug Newcomb explains the change and the objections to it in his Public Policy Connections blog post YouTube Sends Users To Copyright School: Should Content Owners Have to Go, Too?, 15 April 2011. PCMagazine.com also has a brief article on the announcement itself, YouTube Copyright School Now in Session, 14 April 2011.
This is so stupid.
Does YouTube really think that this will reduce the amount of copyright infringement on their site?
And although YouTube thinks that this will educate people about copyright, what it really does is show how little the owners of YouTube know about copyright.
In the video, it says that "copyright is a form of protection for creative works". This is, in fact, a complete, upside-down misunderstanding of copyright law.
Copyright law is not supposed to "protect" content. That's not it's purpose. What copyright law is supposed to do is promote art and science by giving copyright owners limited rights to their creations for a limited period of time.
To describe copyright law as "protection" is wrong. Copyright infringement does not, in any case, "harm" content.
Here is an article that explains the true purpose of copyright:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html
Posted by: Matthew Barich | April 30, 2011 at 06:47 AM