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Comment by dingaling | Hacker News Reader

> Why would you take that risk? How could you protect yourself against that risk?

Host only original content of which you or your registered users are the declared copyright holders.

Flickr, Smugmug and other enthusiast photo gallery sites seem to have walked this line quite successfully. Imgur and its ilk haven't because they've never really had a reason to care. Now they do.

So YouTube wouldn't be the massive entity it is now if it were truly YouTube and forbade uploading of any derived content. But perhaps that would be better.

MP3 sites might be more like SoundCloud with original content.

I find it difficult to be moved by the protests of people who just want to post other people's creations. Link to it, don't copy it.

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> Host only original content of which you or your registered users are the declared copyright holders.

And what magic spell do you expect publishers to cast to distinguish the two when you allow users to post content? Do you have the faintest idea how absurd what you're saying is?

> Host only original content of which you or your registered users are the declared copyright holders.

How would a company go about being certain of this, do you think? I can't think of a way to do it with uploaded content that doesn't have a nasty error rate. Obviously it becomes trivial if you take the Netflix approach and source everything from the owners directly, which means working only with the biggest providers who have legal departments and such. With restrictions like this, even SoundCloud can't exist - almost everything on there is a derived work!

Have I missed something? Can you help me understand how a site can be certain it hosts only original or otherwise authorized content without taking a Netflix-type approach? I would love to be wrong, and for there to be an easy, cost-efficient approach that offers a suitably low error rate and enables protecting content creators while preventing abuses.

> Host only original content of which you or your registered users are the declared copyright holders.

Good luck proving what copyright everything that your users upload has. Such systems cost billions of dollars to develop and are prone to abuse.

> it were truly YouTube and forbade uploading of any derived content

Most content is in some way derived. Forbidding such things would effectively eliminate gaming channels, political channels, music channels, review channels, podcasts etc.

> MP3 sites might be more like SoundCloud

You do realize the RIAA is not particularly happy about SoundCloud either, right? And much content on there can still be described as 'derived'.

> I find it difficult to be moved by the protests of people who just want to post other people's creations.

I find it difficult to be moved by copyright maximalists, who used other people's work to get where thy are, but now insist that they should profit from a piece of work 70+ years after the author is dead.

No memes = no culture.

I am opposed, and will remain so, until such time as the big players either demonstrate real harm, or recognize the many benefits they get.

And they do benefit significantly.

What they claim is always the same,"billions lost", yet fail ti explain where all that money actually comes from.

Entertainment dollars for the vast majority are largely fixed. There aren't those dollars actually out there.

What I find particularly onerous is the idea of not actually being able to put material out there intended to be shared freely. Did that make it into this mess?

It's not just about hosting. It's about linking, too.

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