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watching you-tube clips immoral?

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draken12

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I´m having a hard time trying to figure this out...

I´ve watched tons and tons of you-tube clips that violates the copyright laws, and I´m sure - so have you. What I´m talking about is movie-clips, music-videos and conserts etc.

Is this immoral? :confused:

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Youtube has an immediate removal of the video, and an automatic three strike removal of the account policy, whenever a copyright violation claim is made and goes unchallenged (or the claim proven right, when challenged), to combat copyright infringement. So it's safe to assume if the video is on youtube, and you didn't reach it through one of those link sites specially designed to hide the copyrighted video by uploading it to youtube and other sites under false names, the copyright holder doesn't mind the clip being up there.

Edited by Jake_Ellison
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You-Tube is morally sketchy, because they don't give a rat's ass about whether intellectual property is being respected. They comply with the law, and that's it. So the question for you, as a potential user, is whether it matters to you whether somebody's IP is being posted without permission. Is it a good thing for you to patronize a sketchy operation, and what makes it good?

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I wouldn't patronize those videos that you suspect are violations of copyright. It's not theirs, and they have no right to post them. Patronizing them gives them more web status, sometimes in the millions of views, which is encouraging them to do more of the same. I would only view the ones you are sure are posted by permission. But you are right, the ease of posting to some sites means that copyright violations run amuck.

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At the beginning, YouTube was blatantly in total violation of the law -- I didn't dare visit the site in the early 2000's because they had almost nothing that WAS legal. They followed the exact same business model as all the piracy P2P companies — break the law first, force the content creator groups into a settlement later. The most interesting aspect of it all, if you ask me, is the business aspect and how basically no law abiding person with principles could possibly own the hottest web properties of the past 10 years because their existence depended upon the encouraging of flagrant disregard for copyright. Tell me how you could have possibly have had a prayer of 'competing' with YouTube when it first started if you had sane copyright respecting policies? That's the government not doing their job AT ALL, a market where the only one who can rise to the top is the thief.

As much as I'm sure this is going to sink into a deep discussion of "implied permission by inaction" thread, I just want to mention that I find it funny how Objectivists and copyrights supporting folks seem so EXTREMELY aware of movie, music, and book copyrights, but then you'll go off and see the same people (or at least I have on many occassions) posting up random web sourced photographs on their blogs and using typefaces in the blog or website logos. To use a typeface in a graphic design, you need to secure the rights or find public domain fonts -- just like anything else. As for the "presumed" public domain funny photos that get passed around -- it is the same thing -- there is no way on earth to know if the original person who annotated the image and 'passed it on' had any right to the image.

Basically the internet as we know it is almost unusable if we TRULY respect copyright to the core. For those of us that have replaced real life interaction with friends with interaction with friends online, some which we have never met in person, there is no legal analog allowing us to do things we can do with our in-the-flesh friends. Isn't it natural when a friend stops by to want to play a really cool song you discovered for him? But to play that same song with the telephone held to the speaker would be illegal, I guess.

Still -- for whatever reason -- I feel no guilt archiving a news site URL to my harddrive (incase it disappears from the internet) or passing it on to friends in an email, as I'm sure my grand parents once clipped articles out of their newspaper and mailed them to friends.

Edited by parasitius
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Actually You Tube has come a long way in its copyright protection policies since the Viacom lawsuit.

They now use software that checks uploaded videos against existing copyright files.

Much of what is on You Tube is also posted by the source of the material or the copyright holder. One can ensure moral use of YT by checking where the video was posted from.

This is one area that is dubious:

"In August 2008, a U.S. court ruled in Lenz v. Universal Music Corp. that copyright holders cannot order the removal of an online file without first determining whether the posting reflected fair use of the material. The case involved Stephanie Lenz from Gallitzin, Pennsylvania, who had made a home video of her 13-month-old son dancing to Prince's song "Let's Go Crazy" and posted the 29-second video on YouTube."

So I guess that part comes down to the morality of "Fair Use" laws.

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You-Tube is morally sketchy, because they don't give a rat's ass about whether intellectual property is being respected.

Citation needed please.

They comply with the law, and that's it.

YouTube offers a similar service to OO.Net. They provide an infrastructure by which their users may share content suited to the infrastructure. On OO.NET, the content is text. On YouTube, the content is Video.

YouTube and OO.NET both expect their members to comply with what they consider proper behavior - including not posting materials to which one is not entitled.

Is it just to damn either (for what else can "morally sketchy" imply?) for failing to police every piece of content posted to ensure that compliance by its free-acting members is complete? Is GC guilty if, without his knowledge, I copy an AP article without permission and post it here? Is GC guilty if, without his knowledge, you read it, and derive value from it?

So the question for you, as a potential user, is whether it matters to you whether somebody's IP is being posted without permission. Is it a good thing for you to patronize a sketchy operation, and what makes it good?

THAT, at least, is absolutely correct.

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Yes, I would say that Greedy Capitalist (David) is responsible for everything that is posted to oo.net. It is up to him to insure that the content is legal and moral, so yes, he is ultimately responsible if some members post AP news stories in their entirety, without first getting permission to post them. Same with images, and anything else that can be posted up here. Now he does have a team of monitors who also ought to be aware of these issues to help him in keeping oo.net clean, and if someone violates the Objectivist morality too often, they can be booted off. I certainly do not agree at all that the organizers of YouTube are not responsible for what is posted to their website -- they are responsible, and fully. A website is like a publication, and he who publishes it is responsible for the content. If they don't want to take that position, then they shouldn't be aiding and abetting illegal and immoral activity through their system.

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