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RSSSandra Aistars, Time Warner's assistant general counsel for intellectual property, made that point this morning, at a Gotham Media Ventures conference about digital rights management in New York City.
For instance, she said, the company has no objections to the clip, "'Lord of the Rings' was too long," a parody spot created by fans that uses footage from the movie, and is available on YouTube and other video-sharing sites.
If that clip constitutes a fair use of copyrighted material is subject to debate, but Aistars said the company isn't seeking to remove it regardless of whether it has legal grounds to do so. "We're not running around asserting our legal rights every time someone's doing something that's not a fair use," Aistars told the audience. "We realize these are fans," she said of the creators.
Of course, the problem for creators and companies like YouTube, is that they don't know in advance which clips the media companies will approve of and which they will claim constitute copyright violations. Currently, it's left to people to gamble that the studio won't take them to court, where they can be fined up to $150,000 per violation.
Video-sharing sites like YouTube have at least some protection in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's safe harbor provisions, which appear to require copyright owners to serve them with a takedown notice before commencing litigation, but that's still subject to interpretation.
Meantime, if media companies like Time Warner are getting a benefit out of fan-created videos, automatic copyright filters or other enforcement actions aren't the way to further fan creativity.
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Then here: http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=75797&passFuseAction=PublicationsSearch.showSearchReslts&art_searched=freewheel&page_number=0
Instead companies like CondeNet want to monetize it - either indirectly by securing links back to their original site, improving their search engine ranking or by starting a licensing discussion. Content is proliferating online at such a high rate that a takedown-driven approach is essentially another version of the arcade game whack-a-mole.
There are still unanswered questions like 'How much ad revenue should a publisher get if their 75% of their content is being copied'. That said, publishers can finally have full visibility of how and where their content appears across the web - with the ability to act to capture some of the upside.
The main concern for the copyright owners is the "bit perfect copies," mass distribution and loss of control that eats into their revenue. Fair use laws covered time shifting for later consumption. So in a general sense, dumping the output of your cable box to your PC is no different than using a VCR or DVR. Nobody sued Xerox because sales of War & Peace were at risk. Why? Because its a massive pain in the a&&.
It is the ease of which a person can massively re-distribute the content in its entirety without permission that presents the biggest problem. The monetization aspect - which is key to the original creation of that content - is lost.