Where's the fair use?

[Napoleon the Clown]

Fair Use must be considered as per the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. There are fucking bots that trudge through YouTube videos, and I'm pretty sure a bot can't make that call.

There are people whose income comes primarily from YouTube videos. Where it's an entire company with employees who would face not getting paid because there is no money coming in due to a spurious copyright claim. Alas, until YouTube gets the shit sued out of it for doing nothing about false claims, this will keep happening.

edit for typo

[Formless]

One wonders if Google might reasonably be targeted by a class-action lawsuit on behalf of umpty thousand people who all lost a few hundred dollars each in ad revenue while Google "investigated" spurious DMCA claims against them.

They probably have legal language intended to prevent this from happening, but I've always been deeply hoping that some court would rule that "you promise not to sue us if we do something wrong" isn't valid legalese in a contract. I mean, I can't sign a contract that renders me immune from criminal prosecution if the plaintiff sees fit to press charges; why should I be able to sign a contract that renders me immune from lawsuits if I am demonstrably acting in bad faith or violating good business practices?

The other way round, I'd think. This way original content owners have no grounds to sue Google/Youtube/Whatever Inc for aiding and abetting intellectual property theft, and the only people who lose out are internet movie critics and the like. As always, all corporate policies are designed to protect the corporation.

The DMCA's Safe Harbor provision only applies as long as the service provider has a reasonable system in place to deal with copyright claims and DMCA takedown notices. That is the key word: reasonable. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that a class action lawsuit against Google would be possible on account of the problem with stealing monetization money: the simply failure to put the money in an escrow account and awarding it to whomever wins the case and not before the case is resolved seems like a ridiculously obvious oversight and seems like a negligible burden on Google. Totalbiscuit made the same suggestion a long time ago now way before Doug Walker said the same thing in this recent video. The way that they have it now actively facilitates theft, and if the law doesn't allow a lawsuit in such a case then the law is poorly written. As Totalbiscuit said, most of the money a video will make it makes in the first few weeks, and then its views per day start to peter out. It takes longer for a Youtuber or Youtube based company (like Channel Awesome) to deal with a claim than it takes for the copyright troll to steal most of the video's worth.

Even if such a class action lawsuit failed, I suspect it might still work anyway. At least, it might change Youtube's behavior and system even if the damaged parties don't get reparations. This whole issue goes back to that lawsuit Viacom brought against Google and lost, remember? Even though Google was protected by the DMCA's Safe Harbor provisions, Google still made changes to appease Hollywood in the future. The point of a lawsuit, then, would be to put pressure on Google to do what is ethical and good for the users and businesses they are now making money off of. Getting damages out of Google would probably be seen as merely a bonus for a lot of these guys. They only care about Google/Youtube insofar as its practically a monopoly, but if someone came along with a service that is as good or better on the technical front and ready to go to bat for them against the film, music, and gaming industries, people would flock to it in droves. Hell, the only reason that Doug Walker is on Youtube is because Disney shut down Blip. Youtube needs to make these changes, because they may be big, but giants like them have gone down before.