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Google is buying video-sharing website YouTube for $1.65bn (£883m) in shares after a weekend of speculation that a deal was in the offing. The two companies will continue to operate independently, Google said as it announced the news on Monday. YouTube, launched in February 2005, has grown quickly into one of the most popular websites on the internet. It has 100 million videos viewed every day and an estimated 72 million individual visitors each month.
Although much of YouTube's content is mind-numbing antics performed by teenagers with considerable time at their disposal, an extensive portion is copyrighted material. YouTube recently found itself in marginal trouble with NBC Studios for hosting the Saturday Night Live skit 'The Chronic of Narnia.'But that trouble passed when NBC simply asked YouTube to remove the infringing material. The video downloading website complied, and within days the event was a mere memory. However any YouTube aficionado knows the extent of copyright material, if we consider every instance regardless of length, is comparable to many online communities accused of copyright infringement. Content holders with an axe to grind may be itching for the opportunity to strike at Google.In Mark Cuban's blog, he points out the potential legal problems stems from a technicality on YouTubes part – the site isn't truly a streaming site. Rather, it's a 'progressive downloading' website. With enough marginal computer skills, any YouTube fan can easily download scores of TV show clips and distribute them as he or she wishes.
Of course, when most people think about potential legal liability for YouTube, they are thinking about potential copyright risks. And although nothing in the Internet legal realm is entirely certain, YouTube looks to be on relatively firm legal ground. Unlike some more aggressive companies (like the old Napster), YouTube has the benefit of a set of special "safe harbors" created for online service providers as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). If your activities fall within the safe harbors, as defined in Section 512 of the Copyright Act, you can't be liable for money damages for copyright infringement based on those activities. There is a different safe harbor for each of the following activities: providing network access (e.g., your ISP), caching, storing material on behalf of uses (e.g., web hosting), and providing information location tools (e.g., search engines and linking). One of those DMCA safe harbors was designed to protect providers of hosting services. When it was passed, Congress had big web hosting services in mind, but the rules work just as well for video hosting services (like YouTube), blog hosting (like Blogger), and music lockering (like MP3Tunes). There are a number of requirements that a hosting provider must meet, but the most important one is the implementation of a "notice-and-takedown" policy. YouTube has such a policy in place, allowing copyright owners to notify it of infringing videos and taking them down promptly upon receiving such a notice. Other requirements include implementing a policy of terminating "repeat infringers," which YouTube also has, and registering a "copyright agent" with the Copyright Office, which YouTube has done.
