Piracy as a Red Herring
A couple of years ago, my girlfriend and I created a quick video as a present to a friend of mine, featuring a small cardboard cutout of Flat Stanley partying with an assortment of other stuffed animals we had lying around our apartment. Since the setting of the whole video was in a club, we set it to 50 Cent's "In Da Club".
We put this video up on Facebook. It was up for a while, but within a couple of weeks, it had been removed, and I got a friendly reminder from Facebook not to upload content violating copyright laws.
50 Cent, his record label, and Facebook are well within their rights to ask that I remove this content, because it doesn't belong to me. But it did get me thinking: they can't possibly have people patrolling the Internet manually, looking for popular songs. Instead, they probably built a system to analyze audio in videos and see if it matches patterns in copyrighted music. If it does, it's flagged by the computer system for review, and then people check to verify the content is, in fact, an infringement. (They're probably getting us to help pay for this computer system by selling it to us in the form of the Shazam mobile app.)
Again, I was in the wrong. I'm not disputing that. But really, think of the man hours and money that were put into building that system? Why not invest that money into a new means of distributing music instead of going after copyright violators? You can't do everything.
We put this video up on Facebook. It was up for a while, but within a couple of weeks, it had been removed, and I got a friendly reminder from Facebook not to upload content violating copyright laws.
50 Cent, his record label, and Facebook are well within their rights to ask that I remove this content, because it doesn't belong to me. But it did get me thinking: they can't possibly have people patrolling the Internet manually, looking for popular songs. Instead, they probably built a system to analyze audio in videos and see if it matches patterns in copyrighted music. If it does, it's flagged by the computer system for review, and then people check to verify the content is, in fact, an infringement. (They're probably getting us to help pay for this computer system by selling it to us in the form of the Shazam mobile app.)
Again, I was in the wrong. I'm not disputing that. But really, think of the man hours and money that were put into building that system? Why not invest that money into a new means of distributing music instead of going after copyright violators? You can't do everything.