No-one bearing a key cost of doing digital video business

Two recent video-sharing debacles indicate that the DMCA is failing to locate the cost of accurately identifying copyright breaches with either video sharing sites or copyright holders themselves.

Last week a 15-year-old Australian boy sent a fake take-down notice to YouTube as a prank (Mashable) and the site promptly complied. Commentators and the Australian Broadcasting Commission, who owned the copyright in question and was apparently perfectly happy to see it distributed online, were rightly concerned as YouTube's apparent willingness to accept almost any take-down notice without assessing its provenance. A couple of months earlier, Viacom spammed YouTube with 100,000 take-down requests (BoingBoing); YouTube complied; and now the Electronic Frontier Foundation is organising a class action to protest at the removal of legitimate "user-generated" clips.

The implications of this stand-off for the online public are not good. There are obvious freedom of speech implications when Viacom or a teenage prankster can have legitimate content removed from the web's premier video content channel, accompanied by threats of account deletion for the creators, but there are also issues of who should bear the considerable burden of protecting rights-holders from copyright violation - and by implication bear the burden of protecting legitimate content creators from falling victim to malicious or incidental take-down notices that no-one is taking the trouble to validate.