Watching the YouTube Watchmen

Ever since the idea of automated scanning of YouTube content for infringing material first came up, I've wondered about its viability. Would safeguards exist for people who posted other people's copyrighted works legitimately?

A number of organizations have banded together to address that very problem. Using the media companies' earlier "Principles for User Generated Content Services" document as a springboard, six groups (Electronic Frontier Foundation, American University’s Center for Social Media and the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, Public Knowledge, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and the ACLU of Northern California) have issued their own manifesto: "Fair Use Principles for User Generated Video Content." This second document strikes a balance between the twin principles behind copyright: protection for the individual rights holder and the public good. In a nutshell, they seek to keep overzealous filters from taking down legitimate material, by building some human oversight and appeal procedures.

This is all well and good, and I certainly hope that the media companies, YouTube and other emerging players in this field see the win-win aspects of looking out for both the big and little guys. But I hope that all this poking around the finer aspects of copyright law will also provoke a discussion about how to deal with the Internet's international nature and the fact that copyright laws vary from country to country. Here's one of the simplest questions: what happens if I post a music video on YouTube that uses a song that's public domain in Canada, but not in the US? Does it get yanked, or does a a bit get flipped somewhere so that only Canucks can watch it?

Right problems like that are addressed elsewhere rather ham-handedly; just once, I'd like to see people try to sort this out before it becomes a real issue, rather than after.