Copyright agreements between media and web companies?
The giants are trying to tame the copyright jungle known as the Web. On Thursday, several giant companies — including Disney, Microsoft, NBC Universal, Viacom, CBS, and News Corp.’s Fox and MySpace — agreed on rules for posting copyright-protected material online.
The agreement, reported by the Wall Street Journal, was the result of a year’s worth of negotiation between Disney and Microsoft, who brought the others in — including two smaller companies, Veoh Networks and Dailymotion SA.
Adhere to Certain Principles
In fact, the entire agreement could be seen as reflecting the companies’ mood in the post-YouTube-lawsuit era. The companies agreed not to challenge sites for infringement if the sites, according to the Journal, “adhere to certain principles.” The principles include eliminating infringing, copyright-protected material uploaded by users, and, if the content does get uploaded, blocking it before it is made available to the public.
Google said it is making progress on at least one of those principles. It announced that it is testing technology to prevent copyright-protected content on its sites from being made public, by pulling flagged content down within minutes. It said it doesn’t yet have a solution to prevent the content from being posted in the first place.
For this recently announced agreement, it seems it’s the intent that counts. The agreement is more of an understanding about rules of engagement than a legal contract, and requires best efforts by content sites.
Step Forward or Not?
“There’s always a question about what is a good faith effort,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst with Jupiter Research. But, given the digital world of easily distributed content, he said, the best that might be possible is to encourage proper behavior and best efforts, as the agreement does.
James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester, offered a different take, saying that the announcement was not a step forward. “All it did was put in one place the arguments that they have been making behind closed doors,” he said. It doesn’t propose a specific technology or rewards system, he added, but just gives the “lawyers at each of these companies something to point to as evidence that they have, indeed, been working the past eight months.”
McQuivey suggested that they could have established a centralized database of copyright-protected videos and a rights-management clearinghouse. The new announcement doesn’t pressure Google, he said, and Google can now say it is “light years ahead of the rest of them and therefore can do its own thing.”
This article via Barry Levine, newsfactor.com