It strikes me as funny that Eric Schmidt <i>"rarely saves anything; after he reads an important message, the CEO sends it straight to the trash."</i><p>Since, you know, his company is responsible for preserving many things that people wish they could delete. Well, maybe "If You Have Something That You Don't Want Anyone To Know, Maybe You Shouldn't Be Doing It In The First Place"
Do you think Youtube's founders are thinking "we should adhered to copyright material more closely", or "we should have deleted all those emails"?<p>Both sides have a point here (content creators deserve to be compensated, or at least not not-compensated, vs. youtube helped expose media to people who would never have seen/heard some content before).<p>IMHO, I'd like to think that youtube made reasonable decisions in the past (take down full movies, tv shows). I certainly don't have the data, but I would hope that youtube helped popularized and spread videos that would never have done so otherwise (e.g., numa numa, rickroll).
"While no one looks good here, YouTube's founders come off particularly poorly."<p>In the legal sense, I would agree that YouTube's founders may be in trouble. However, the statement (like a lot of the rest of the article) sounds qualitative, and I take issue with that. The underlying problem is that copyright law doesn't work and YouTube's founders know it. They didn't have respect for stupid legislation and therefore pushed it as far as they could without getting in trouble.<p>I think it's imperative that lawsuits such as this aren't seen as a search for right or wrong. It's two giant corporations arguing about dollars and cents, so typical ethical standards we use when dealing with humans do not apply.
The current system encourages companies to use copyrighted material get a foothold in the market. There's no real penalty for having an unknown website full of unauthorized content.