But the GP discards intent as a relevant point and says if you host it, you should be thrown in jail, regardless of intent.
Likely, somewhere in the middle is more reasonable. But the parent is correct in that the volume of infringing content on YouTube appears to be significantly larger than just about anywhere else, and no one is raiding their offices. No one is going to jail.
So the asymmetry is striking. If it were all purely civil rather than criminal, I'd get it.
An argument based on intent is an argument about the reality we live in, an argument that ignores intent might as well be about a fictional world and isn't relevant to ours.
I'd disagree, I think that Youtube shows their intent to allow infringing based on the gross amount of copyrighted content they allow on their website.
I said no such thing to be clear.
> He was running a website that revolved around violating millions of copyrights. Why shouldn't he go to jail?
I acknowledge that youtube seems very different from hosting a site specifically for unlawfully distributing copyrighted works. But there was a time when Youtube arguably blurred the line and gave publicity to the "our users just posted it and we didn't know about it" defence.
There's a real societal risk to treating what would formerly be called culture as intellectual capital and granting extreme powers to owners of that capital. Though the costs of distribution have never been lower there comes a point where the cost of distribution exceeds the expected returns. Even if the work is distributed for free, there is still a cost.
If we're going to allow the whole one download equals 0 < x <= 1 lost sales thing that seems to be increasingly accepted now, then you are implicitly allowing that it is the lost sale that is the problem. As such, distribution of out of print material without fee is as damaging because if I listen to n hours per week of material then I am not buying that n hours of material and I have deprived a sale. The same can be said for any intellectual capital, even copyleft, that does not make money. Effectively, it becomes a divine right to have customers which is a bizarre line of thinking that seldom seems to be explicitly stated.
I have listened to works that I could not, even though I strongly desire to, buy on CD or obtain by lawful download. There are some who argue a particular line that has the corollary that the work should be lost forever and I should never have heard them. By the lost sale argument I definitely shouldn't have and should instead have spent money on new culture that personally I find quite grating.
There are books, games, software, songs, albums, movies and TV series for which the copyright persists but there is no lawful distribution channel. This effectively makes it civilly or criminally unlawful to distribute the work for free. In these cases I would certainly think twice before taking on the burden of becoming that distributor.