Hacker News Reader

Comment by parineum | Hacker News Reader

Facebook, Twitter and Google (YouTube) have used that strategy to ignore their obligations to filter their content by getting into some type of "too bug to fail" situation and throwing their hands up when they are asked to do their duty. Those products didn't fill a niche by innovating, they filled a niche by ignoring the obligations that were preventing others from filling the niche.

View on HN

> Facebook, Twitter and Google (YouTube) have used that strategy to ignore their obligations to filter their content by getting into some type of "too bug to fail" situation and throwing their hands up when they are asked to do their duty

I don't think this is quite fair to YouTube. They've spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing ContentID. It's not perfect, but it's without a doubt the most sophisticated system to date. It's a difficult problem, but I don't see how you can say they've "thrown up their hands".

I thought the DMCA reporting system was basically made for Google (maybe by Google???) so they could have a middle-ground. They shift responsibility to content owners, through the law; then sell themselves as virtuous through ContentID and keep enough infringing content to not too deleteriously effect their platform -- collecting ad revenue even on content they allow that's infringing.

You can say what you like, but that's genius level politics-business IMO.

no their problem is that the DMCA system sucks as it wasn't even written this century (1998), so they created ContentID as a response. They do benefit from the way the system exists currently because of this since the cost of developing a competitor to ContentID is so seemingly prohibitively expensive that nobody else tries to do what YouTube does.

They built it after they got huge and were sued by Viacom and others.

I own and operate a flea market. I sell stall usage to merchants who sell their goods at the flea market.

Am I responsible when stolen goods are sold from my stalls?

I own and operate an RV park. Someone is selling illegal drugs from one of the RVs.

Am I responsible for the illegal drug sales?

> Am I responsible for the illegal drug sales?

You might not be liable for the sale itself but, depending on the details, you could definitely still have serious legal risk.

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/criminal-acts-activi...

"Behind every great fortune is a crime."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com