IP Democracy: WSJ: Media Group to Unveil Copyright Guidelines

The Wall Street Journal has this cryptic report today that a group of media and online video companies will unveil a set of agreed-upon copyright guidelines aimed at protecting copyrighted content, particularly video content, online. The companies involved are CBS, Dailymotion, Microsoft, NBC Universal, News Corp.'s Fox and MySpace units, Viacom and Walt Disney.

Although little detail is offered, the guidelines provide for using "technology to eliminate copyright-infringing content uploaded by users to Web sites, and blocking any infringing material before it is publicly accessible. (italics added)" The devil is in the details, but the latter part of the "guidelines" is troubling.

What this means is that the involved companies (and Google isn't one of them, although the search giant announced its own, similar copyright filtering system earlier this week) plan to block content that the technology deems to be a violation of copyright. As was the case with Google's new filtering system, the central question is: will the new guidelines eat into "fair use" of copyrighted material by automatically blocking content that otherwise is permissable under copyright laws, such as parodies, commentary and so forth.

It's hard to see how an effective filtering system can work across so many companies' sites. Will each company that has agreed to these guidelines have a vast database of all the other companies' copyrighted content? It seems they'd have to, otherwise how would MySpace be able to block the uploading of content copyrighted by CBS "before it is publicly accessible." More than likely, each company will block the uploading of its own content and the guidelines are designed to notify users that this is the case, a more limited kind of filtering that will nonetheless still be difficult to implement.

Setting aside the technological challenges, it's clear that content owners aren't happy with the current "take-down" regime, which requires them to roam the Internet and find their copyrighted content and then request take-downs. But blocking content from ever seeing the light of day, or even attempting to block content, can't be good for free speech.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on October 18, 2007 8:30 AM to IP Democracy