Update: Titan media Vs. Veoh

[Matt 26z]

Maybe you don't! But if I were an artist who created a piece of material from which I derive my income, I'd be pissed if buyers on YouTube or Veoh were getting it for free.

Oh I definitely see what you are saying and I agree with you there. However if you want to stand behind copyright holders 100%, you'll have to eliminate every user controlled avenue of file sharing from video sites all the way down to public FTP servers. It's just the nature of the internet that it's very difficult to control this stuff, and anyone who puts their material online takes that risk. It's the same type of risk that Hollywood takes by airing movies on TV, knowing that some people are recording them.

We've all had stuff stolen from us before. Maybe it's content, designs, text or whatever. It sucks, but the blame lies soley in the hands of those who did it.... not the closest person with a fat wallet to sue.

Why should Veoh and YouTube make money and not share with the people who created the content?

I'm on the fence with this one. The RIAA probably deserved every penny Napster ever made. But if you want to look at services such as YouTube and Veoh that deal primarily in legit material, it's very difficult to determine what kind of traffic the infringing content brought to the site that otherwise wouldn't have been there anyway.

According to your profit sharing logic, webhosts should give infringement victims a slice of the hosting plan profits. If it hadn't of been for the stolen content they wouldn't have sold the bandwidth. Right?

And finally, if I owned a building in some downtown city and I let anyone stop by to do lines of coke, fuck underage people, sell drugs, and sell stolen goods, then of course, I ought to be held accountable for those illegal activities.

The question is, do the video sites permit their users to upload stolen content and not do anything about it? There is a big difference between that and your example.

Back when CDR discs first came out... and this was before the popularity in broadband and Napster... people would have CD burning parties. I went to a couple of them. We would bring our entire music collection, blank CDRs and computers. By the end of the night everyone had all the albums they wanted. According to your logic, the landlord of the apartment should be sued by the RIAA.

Site owners that are trying to opperate a legit service can only know and do so much to combat piracy. It is the people using these services that are to blame!

Just like owners of online properties need to be held accountable for the actions of their members. Just because there are too many people or it's too hard to supervise isn't reason enough,

AOL, Blogspot, YouTube, Flikr, etc... they'd all be sued out of business if you had your way. Then again you sound like the type who fought against the VCR 25 years ago.