British Online Copyright Laws Draw Debates; New York Times, 3/4/10

Nick Bilton, New York Times; British Online Copyright Laws Draw Debates:

"An article published on Thursday in, The Guardian, discusses a debate taking place in the British Parliament around a new “digital economy bill.”

One amendment in particular is stirring a lot of discussion about its impact on content online. The Guardian writes:

The new proposal – which was passed in the House of Lords by 165 votes to 140 – gives a high court judge the right to issue an injunction against a Web site accused of hosting a “substantial” amount of copyright infringing material, potentially forcing the entire site offline.

Critics say the major problem with this amendment is that a judge could shut down a Web site because of copyright infringement, even if the site’s manager didn’t put the content online.

What is left unanswered is how a company can be held accountable for every piece of content placed on its site. Many critics of this bill and others in Europe say it is most likely to result in the stifling of creativity, innovation and free speech. In the United States, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act offers some protection against liability to Internet service providers and Web sites that host copyrighted material uploaded by third parties.

There are similar tensions over Internet content and privacy elsewhere in Europe. Last week the Italian court held three of Google’s top executives accountable for a defamatory video placed on YouTube by teenagers. And the French parliament approved a recent bill that will crack down on Internet piracy by banning people from the Web if they are caught downloading copyrighted content more than three times.

When it comes to the Italian ruling in the YouTube case, Google has argued that it can’t possibly police every piece of content entering its Web site. Every minute on YouTube there are over 20 hours of video uploaded to the site, which ads up to nearly 30,000 hours of video a day. Google, it can be argued, might have the resources to hire thousands of people needed to view every video. But every other video, image, music and storage Web site would also have to monitor its content.

Monitoring that content is financially, and probably physically, impossible.

Some also argue that strict legal cases, including the latest British laws, would deter some companies from operating within these countries for fear that the potential legal costs could outweigh the returns."

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/british-online-copyright-laws-draw-debates/?scp=1&sq=copyright&st=cse