Good luck with that, YouTube

YouTube is trying to get tougher on copyright violations. Here is their latest attempt at "education." 

Hard to believe that YouTube thinks this kind of stuff will be effective, but at least it might protect them against copyright cases against them a little. 

It just speaks to how remarkably out of touch copyright law is in the United States. We do have to protect the financial interests of the creators, but we need mechanisms to permit the kind of reuse and remixing that your average kid would engage in. "Fair use" in the pre-Internet era must be different than fair use in the Internet era. 

I don't expect Congress to change anything anytime soon, so we will continue to see this kind of ridiculous exercise in the future. 

Comments

[Chris Willis]

Here is my favorite video of how the copyright system should be reformed. http://www.ted.com/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strangling_creativity.html

In a time when creativity should be valued above all other attributes, we have a system that calls many of our creative expressions "piracy".

[Justin B.]

Lessig is living gold. I really owe a lot to him, even though I have never met him. His thoughts on copyright I have pretty much adopted without exception. Glad you are listening to Lessig, Chris.