CMU School of Drama


Tuesday, November 13, 2018

YouTube CEO calls EU’s proposed copyright regulation financially impossible

The Verge: “This video contains multiple copyrights, ranging from sound recording to publishing rights,” Wojcicki wrote. “Although YouTube has agreements with multiple entities to license and pay for the video, some of the rights holders remain unknown. That uncertainty means we might have to block videos like this to avoid liability under article 13. Multiply that risk with the scale of YouTube, where more than 400 hours of video are uploaded every minute, and the potential liabilities could be so large that no company could take on such a financial risk.”

1 comment:

Simone Schneeberg said...

While I don’t know the true extent this law will have, as I have not read article 13 nor (obviously) have I attempted to track copyright infringement across a worldwide video platform, part of me feels that there has to be a degree of exaggeration in these claims. It feels like saying that users will see such a cut in content stems more from the financial cost of combing through every detail weighed against the act of just slashing anything bordering on suspicious. Although I could be wrong given what YouTube’s CEO said about “Despacito” with is range of copyrights and rights holders. It could be that I am only considering the more surface level things like the song and the lyrics itself and completely missing the point that these issues will truly stem from smaller specificities owned in part by other parties. Part of me agrees with the CEO saying companies that already comply with a copyright management system like YouTube’s ContentID should be able to continue operation as is; however, given the kinds of clearly infringing material you can find on YouTube, the caveat might be if the program is already proven to be robust enough.